[PATCH 0/6] Ancillary bus implementation and SOF multi-client support

[Ertman, David M]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Greg KH <gregkh at linuxfoundation.org>
> Sent: Thursday, October 1, 2020 12:14 AM
> To: Ertman, David M <david.m.ertman at intel.com>
> Cc: alsa-devel at alsa-project.org; tiwai at suse.de; broonie at kernel.org; pierre-
> louis.bossart at linux.intel.com; Sridharan, Ranjani
> <ranjani.sridharan at intel.com>; jgg at nvidia.com; parav at nvidia.com
> Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] Ancillary bus implementation and SOF multi-client
> support
> 
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 03:50:45PM -0700, Dave Ertman wrote:
> > The ancillary bus (then known as virtual bus) was originally submitted
> > along with implementation code for the ice driver and irdma drive,
> > causing the complication of also having dependencies in the rdma tree.
> > This new submission is utilizing an ancillary bus consumer in only the
> > sound driver tree to create the initial implementation and a single
> > user.
> 
> So this will not work for the ice driver and/or irdma drivers?  It would
> be great to see how they work for this as well as getting those
> maintainers to review and sign off on this implementation as well.
> Don't ignore those developers, that's a bit "odd", don't you think?
> 
> To drop them from the review process is actually kind of rude, what
> happens if this gets merged without their input?
> 
> And the name, why was it changed and what does it mean?  For non-native
> english speakers this is going to be rough, given that I as a native
> english speaker had to go look up the word in a dictionary to fully
> understand what you are trying to do with that name.

Through our internal review process, objections were raised on naming the
new bus virtual bus. The main objection was that virtual bus was too close to virtio,
virtchnl, etc., that /sys/bus/virtual would be confused with /sys/bus/virtio, and
there is just a lot of 'virt' stuff in the kernel already.

Several names were suggested (like peer bus, which was shot down because in
parts on the English speaking world the peerage means nobility), finally
"ancillary bus" was arrived at by consensus of not hating it.

adjective -
providing necessary support to the primary activities or operation of an organization,
institution, industry, or system.

Changing from ancillary would be a small pain, but do-able if ancillary is really
objectionable.  Do you have any suggestions on a name that would be more
tolerable?

I would like to finalize the name issue before going farther though 😊

Thanks for your review!
-DaveE

> 
> Naming is hard, but I think this name is really hard to explain and
> understand, don't you think?
> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h