A "joke" in the glibc manual

Posted Nov 8, 2018 19:19 UTC (Thu) by raegis (guest, #19594)
In reply to: A "joke" in the glibc manual by Yui
Parent article: A "joke" in the glibc manual

The black Americans aren't that affected by slavery compared to many other ethnic groups around the world. There is still quite a large number of people who live in effective slavery like conditions. If you care more about people's feelings about their grandgrandparents having been slaves than the people who live in effective slavery even today then I can't really take your concern about it seriously.

I'm African American, and the effects of slavery on me, my family, and most other African Americans I know are still present. A good example: the average net worth of African Americans is somewhere close to zero. And no, this is not the result of laziness or some other nonsense you were taught. My mother watched semi-literate white dudes get promoted above her for years. So I won't be getting that inheritance of $100,000+ you will get from your parents, precisely because of discrimination which has continued since slavery.

Back on topic: I never participated in the master/slave discussion, but I do remember rolling my eyes when I learned about the master/slave hard drive assignments to ATAPI. Back then it seemed silly, and inaccurate-- primary/secondary might have been better, since master/slave suggests complete control of one by the other. Regardless, I'm glad people are removing it.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Posted Nov 8, 2018 22:02 UTC (Thu) by vstinner (subscriber, #42675) [Link]

> Regardless, I'm glad people are removing it.

You're welcome :-) Sadly, the terms commonly used in Unix and IT in general, like master_fd, slave_fd for openpty() or the SLAVE command of the NNTP protocol, cannot be easily changed. I only changed the terms where better terms could be used and easily replaced. Again, I only modified 7 lines, whereas Python is around 500K lines :-)

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Posted Nov 8, 2018 23:31 UTC (Thu) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link] (3 responses)

FWIW, as a minor detail, I believe in ATA the “master” device specifically controlled the bus and could decide what happened to the bus w/r/t the “slave” device. That doesn’t mean we have to keep using those terms, but it’s not exactly just “primary” and “secondary” either. (Though those would do fine, the level of information communicated by the different choice of terms is minimal, and it’s not like they communicated enough extra info to really aid in understanding. But there was a little bit of reason for the choice.)

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Posted Nov 8, 2018 23:39 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (2 responses)

Wikipedia has the following to say on the subject:

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Although they are in extremely common use, the terms "master" and "slave" do not actually appear in current versions of the ATA specifications. The two devices are simply referred to as "device 0" and "device 1", respectively, in ATA-2 and later.

It is a common myth that the controller on the master drive assumes control over the slave drive, or that the master drive may claim priority of communication over the other device on the same ATA interface. In fact, the drivers in the host operating system perform the necessary arbitration and serialization, and each drive's onboard controller operates independently of the other.

ATA master/slave

Posted Nov 11, 2018 3:45 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

I always wondered what the relationship between the two devices on an ATA bus is.

While the spec may call them device 0 and device 1, that belies the actual relationship because I've seen the rules that you can't have just device 1 on a bus. If you have any device at all, you have to have device 0.

Does anyone know what the actual role of device 0/master is?

ATA master/slave

Posted Nov 11, 2018 12:34 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Look at section 9.16 Single device configurations in the ATA-5 draft. The only thing that's problematic is that device zero is supposed to identify the state of the PDIAG- and DASP- signals it sees, while device 1 asserts DASP- during reset; without device 0's presence, the host cannot determine the state of PDIAG-, and thus may have trouble identifying the cable type (as it cannot distinguish "faulty device 0" from "no device 0 present").

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Posted Nov 9, 2018 7:23 UTC (Fri) by Yui (guest, #118557) [Link]

>My mother watched semi-literate white dudes get promoted above her for years.

This is probably not because of slavery but just people having an unconscious preference to people that look closer to themselves.