[SPDK] RPC Naming

[Harris, James R <james.r.harris at intel.com>]

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There has been quite a bit of chatter recently about the SPDK RPCs – lack of meaningful error codes in a lot of the RPCs, and at least one RPC returning data in an array with different “types”.  Another sore point is the naming of the RPCs themselves.


  1.  construct v. create (the vast majority use “construct”)
  2.  destruct v. delete v. destroy (the vast majority use “delete”)
  3.  most contain their associated component name in the RPC names, but some of the oldest ones from iscsi do not
  4.  most do not follow a noun_verb(_object) naming convention
  5.  minor nits like “construct_nvme_bdev” – this really attaches an nvme controller, which then creates bdevs for each namespace (there could be many)

I’ve put out a patch series (https://review.gerrithub.io/c/spdk/spdk/+/453036) with suggested names for all of our existing RPCs – there are almost 150 of them now.  All of the old names would still be valid, but deprecated.  We could keep the old names around as aliases for as long as needed.

The patch series has an example of how the get_rpc_methods RPC would be converted to rpc_get_methods, and converts the previously deprecated get/set/clear_trace_flag RPCs to use this new framework.  Thanks to Ben Walker for his help on making some of the Python infrastructure for this simpler than I originally coded it.

If you have an interest in the SPDK RPC API, please take some time and review this patch set.

Thanks,

-Jim