Conversation
sima@chaos.social

🐧sima🐧

kangrejos in copenhagen was great, but the absolute 🤯 moment was when I learned that GFP_ stands for get_free_pages

I had no idea. and @gregkh next to me had the same https://xkcd.com/1053/ experience

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lina@vt.social

Asahi Lina (朝日リナ) // nullptr::live

Reply to @sima@chaos.social
Edited 3 months ago

@sima @gregkh Wait, but I somehow knew that??????

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sima@chaos.social

🐧sima🐧

Reply to @lina@vt.social

@lina @gregkh I just thought it's general protection fault, misspelled, and made no sense. not the first acronym I'll never understand, so just shrugged for the past few decades of looking at kernel code

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ljs

Reply to @sima@chaos.social
@sima @gregkh lol I'm so glad I got that right in the book.

You'd think Greg would suggest 'Greg's F-ing Pages'
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jani@fosstodon.org

Jani Nikula

Reply to @sima@chaos.social

@sima @gregkh This is when the acronym has become a thing of its own instead of merely representing three other words. (A lot of those at $dayjob.)

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jani@fosstodon.org

Jani Nikula

Reply to @jani@fosstodon.org

@sima @gregkh The other day I was wondering what UT stands for in the drm.debug category macros (or enums I think they're these days). DRM_UT_KMS and the like. I have no clue.

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airlied@fosstodon.org

Dave Airlie

Reply to @jani@fosstodon.org

@jani @sima @gregkh I tracked it back to 4fefcb27050b98c97b1c32bc710fc2f874449dee and I see my name in it, but I still have no idea.

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ptesarik@fosstodon.org

Petr Tesarik

Reply to @airlied@fosstodon.org

@airlied @jani @sima @gregkh Just guessing: short for “UTIL”?

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jani@fosstodon.org

Jani Nikula

Reply to @ptesarik@fosstodon.org

@ptesarik @airlied @sima @gregkh Your guess is as good as ours. 🤷

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gregkh

Greg K-H

Reply to @sima@chaos.social
@sima Right after this happened, I went and checked the LDD3 book, and yes it says this in the chapter about memory:

(internally performed by calling, eventually, __get_free_pages, which is the source of the GFP_ prefix))

So I have no excuse for not remembering this either...
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muxelplexer@larkspur.one

muxelplexer

Reply to @sima@chaos.social

@sima @lina @gregkh that is exactly the explanation i gave myself as well when i first allocated some memory :p

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torvalds

Linus Torvalds

Reply to @gregkh

@gregkh @sima “eventually calling __get_free_pages”?

You have to realize that when the GFP_xyz flags were introduced - back in 1992 - “get_free_page()” was the only way to allocate memory.

So “GFP” wasn’t some odd internal thing. There was nothing else (ok, there was a very simply malloc() library on top of that “you can free and allocate one page” mode).

No “eventually” about it. It was the thing.

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