Shared memory mappings for devices [LWN.net]

Shared memory mappings for devices

Posted May 8, 2018 21:33 UTC (Tue) by willy (subscriber, #9762)
In reply to: Shared memory mappings for devices by mirabilos
Parent article: Shared memory mappings for devices

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/core-api/idr.html

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Shared memory mappings for devices

Posted May 11, 2018 7:37 UTC (Fri) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (2 responses)

Ironically, the documentation you linked to doesn't explain either what IDR or IDA are short for.

I miss Byte magazine, which meticulously spelled out an acronym the first time it appeared in an article, no matter how common. For example: "Random Access Memory (RAM)".

Shared memory mappings for devices

Posted May 11, 2018 14:16 UTC (Fri) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]

Oh, I have no idea what either IDR or IDA stand for. It's not stated anywhere in the source code. I suppose I could search the mailing lists to find if there was any explanation when they were first published.

Shared memory mappings for devices

Posted May 15, 2018 23:52 UTC (Tue) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

IBM used to do that in all its manuals as well, and it's an irritating style because acronyms are not abbreviations - they're words in their own right that are better known and have more meaning than the words from which they are derived. Sometimes the acquired meanings even contradict those words. The etymology of the acronym is still useful, of course, but the right way to do it is RAM (Random Access Memory), not Random Access Memory (RAM).

RAM is an interesting example, by the way, because words used illogically was another peeve Byte editors had and the magazine never used RAM to mean what most people meant by it: read/write memory. The term in Byte for that was "programmable memory." RAM would appear in Byte only in contrast with sequential access memory.