On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 10:23:36AM +0000, Oliver Upton wrote: > On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 09:57:04AM +0000, Quentin Perret wrote: > > On Friday 28 Oct 2022 at 08:34:48 (+0000), Oliver Upton wrote: > > > Perhaps it is just me, but the 'initiator' and 'completer' terms are > > > slightly confusing descriptors for the addresses involved in a memory > > > transition. Apply a rename to instead describe memory transitions in > > > terms of a source and target address. > > > > Just to provide some rationale for the initiator/completer terminology, > > the very first implementation we did of this used 'sender/recipient (or > > something along those lines I think), and we ended up confusing > > ourselves massively. The main issue is that memory doesn't necessarily > > 'flow' in the same direction as the transition. It's all fine for a > > donation or a share, but reclaim and unshare become funny. 'The > > recipient of an unshare' can be easily misunderstood, I think. > > > > So yeah, we ended up with initiator/completer, which may not be the > > prettiest terminology, but it was useful to disambiguate things at > > least. > > I see, thanks for the background :) If I've managed to re-ambiguate the > language here then LMK. Frankly, I'm more strongly motivated on the > first patch anyway. Having been previously tangled up in the confusion mentioned by Quentin, I'm also strongly in favour of leaving the terminology as-is for the time being. Once we have some of the more interesting memory transitions (i.e. approaching the cross-product of host/guest/hyp/trustzone doing share/unshare/donate) then I think we'll be in a much better position to improve the naming, but whatever we change now is very unlikely to stick and the patches as we have them now are at least consistent. I replied separately on the first patch, as I don't really have a strong opinion on that one. Will
