explaining acronyms on first usage

Posted Apr 26, 2014 21:08 UTC (Sat) by tpo (subscriber, #25713)
Parent article: Avoiding memory-allocation deadlocks

It would be nice if on the first mention of GFP the article could note that it's an abbreviation of "Get Free Page". Like this for example:

"A good place to start this history is in early 1998 with the introduction of the __GFP_IO (Get Free Page) flag in Linux 2.1.80pre3.

Thanks for the article!
*t

explaining acronyms on first usage

Posted Apr 27, 2014 22:32 UTC (Sun) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

Your request is certainly in line with the LWN author guidelines:

> Acronyms should be spelled out on their first use, except for the most common and obvious ones (i.e. GNU, GPL).

I think I felt that the close proximity to a mention of "get_free_pages()" was sufficient to make it clear. Of course, what is clear to one person may not be clear to another.

Thanks for the feedback.

explaining acronyms on first usage

Posted May 1, 2014 10:29 UTC (Thu) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link]

I see that you did not (yet?) update the article. Technical kernel LWN articles seem to quickly acquire "defacto reference documentation" status.

> I think I felt that the close proximity to a mention of "get_free_pages()" was sufficient to make it clear.

I agree. All the same I managed to read the whole article trying to understand the technical problems (which are far from trivial to see through) wondering until the end what GFP would be standing for... and finally googled it. Then I slapped my head.

But I think me being a stupid human being is not central here. The aim with documentation should be to make it as easy as possible for the reader to understand the technical issues and from that standpoint and this LWN article joining the "reference documentation" I think updating the article would be a good thing to do.

:-)

Thanks Neil!
*t

explaining acronyms on first usage

Posted Jun 9, 2014 13:03 UTC (Mon) by adobriyan (subscriber, #30858) [Link]

> it's an abbreviation of "Get Free Page"

After 10.5 years I know what "gfp" means.
At last!