Re: [PATCH 3/3] xen/evtchn: Clean up teardown handling

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>]

On 22.12.2020 14:33, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> On 22/12/2020 11:52, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> On 22.12.2020 12:28, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>>> On 22/12/2020 10:48, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>> On 21.12.2020 19:14, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>>>>> First of all, rename the evtchn APIs:
>>>>>  * evtchn_destroy       => evtchn_teardown
>>>>>  * evtchn_destroy_final => evtchn_destroy
>>>> I wonder in how far this is going to cause confusion with backports
>>>> down the road. May I suggest to do only the first of the two renames,
>>>> at least until in a couple of year's time? Or make the second rename
>>>> to e.g. evtchn_cleanup() or evtchn_deinit()?
>>> I considered backports, but I don't think it will be an issue.  The
>>> contents of the two functions are very different, and we're not likely
>>> to be moving the callers in backports.
>> Does the same also apply to the old and new call sites of the functions?
> 
> I don't understand your question.  I don't intend the new callsites to
> ever move again, now they're part of the properly idempotent path, and
> any movement in the older trees would be wrong for anything other than
> backporting this fix, which clearly isn't a backport candidate.
> 
> (That said - there's a memory leak I need to create a backport for...)

My thinking was that call sites of functions also serve as references
or anchors when you do backports. Having identically named functions
with different purposes may be misleading people - both ones doing
backports on a very occasional basis, but also us who may be doing
this regularly, but only on halfway recent trees. I, for one, keep
forgetting to check for bool/true/false when moving to 4.7, or the
-ERESTART <=> -EAGAIN change after 4.4(?). For the former I'll be
saved by the compiler yelling at me, but for the latter one needs to
recognize the need for an adjustment. I'm afraid of the same thing
(granted at a lower probability) potentially happening here, down the
road.

Jan