Re: (in)consistency of page/folio function naming

[Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ziepe.ca>]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2021 at 11:09:45AM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 22.04.21 05:20, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > 
> > I'm going through my patch queue implementing peterz's request to rename
> > FolioUptodate() as folio_uptodate().  It's going pretty well, but it
> > throws into relief all the places where we're not consistent naming
> > existing functions which operate on pages as page_foo().  The folio
> > conversion is a great opportunity to sort that out.  Mostly so far, I've
> > just done s/page/folio/ on function names, but there's the opportunity to
> > regularise a lot of them, eg:
> > 
> > 	put_page		folio_put
> > 	lock_page		folio_lock
> > 	lock_page_or_retry	folio_lock_or_retry
> > 	rotate_reclaimable_page	folio_rotate_reclaimable
> > 	end_page_writeback	folio_end_writeback
> > 	clear_page_dirty_for_io	folio_clear_dirty_for_io
> > 
> > Some of these make a lot of sense -- eg when ClearPageDirty has turned
> > into folio_clear_dirty(), having folio_clear_dirty_for_io() looks regular.
> > I'm not entirely convinced about folio_lock(), but folio_lock_or_retry()
> > makes more sense than lock_page_or_retry().  Ditto _killable() or
> > _async().
> > 
> > Thoughts?
> 
> I tend to like prefixes: they directly set the topic.
> 
> The only thing I'm concerned is that we end up with
> 
> put_page vs. folio_put
> 
> which is suboptimal.

We have this issue across the kernel already, eg kref_put() vs its
wrapper put_device()

Personally I tend to think the regularity of 'thing'_'action' is
easier to remember than to try to guess/remember that someone judged
'action'_'thing' to be more englishy.

Jason