On 31 Oct 2022, at 09:26, Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com> wrote:

On 28.10.2022 17:27, George Dunlap wrote:

On Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 8:12 AM Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com> wrote:

On 26.10.2022 21:22, Andrew Cooper wrote:

On 26/10/2022 14:42, Jan Beulich wrote:

paging isn't a great name. While it's what we call the infrastructure
in x86, it has nothing to do with paging things out to disk (the thing
everyone associates the name with), nor the xenpaging infrastructure
(Xen's version of what OS paging supposedly means).

Okay, "paging" can be somewhat misleading. But "p2m" also doesn't fit
the use(s) on x86. Yet we'd like to use a name clearly better than the
previous (and yet more wrong/misleading) "shadow". I have to admit that
I can't think of any other sensible name, and among the ones discussed
I still think "paging" is the one coming closest despite the
generally different meaning of the word elsewhere.

Inside the world of operating systems / hypervisors, "paging" has always
meant "things related to a pagetable"; this includes "paging out to disk".
In fact, the latter already has a perfectly good name -- "swap" (e.g., swap
file, swappiness, hypervisor swap).

Grep for "paging" inside of Xen. We have the paging lock, paging modes,
nested paging, and so on. There's absolutely no reason to start thinking
of "paging" as exclusively meaning "hypervisor swap".

Just to clarify: You actually support my thinking that "paging" is an okay
term to use here? I ask because, perhaps merely because of not being a
native speaker, to me content and wording suggest different things: The
former appears to support my response to Andrew, while the latter reads to
me as if you were objecting.