On 2025-12-08 at 00:34, Mike McClain wrote: > When perusing /var/log/kern.log among others, trying to figure out > why the computer doesn't want to do what I want. I'm constantly > seeing acronyms as SLUB, dma, RCU, GIC. Some I can figure out, others > I suspect I'd have to dig through the kernel source for.
You might also be able to get useful information out of the kernel documentation, which I understand to be available in the linux-doc package set. (I don't have it installed at the moment, so I can't quickly check, but it's where I'd expect to be able to find explanations for e.g. SLUB - and I'd be surprised if it weren't conveniently grep'able.) > Is there anywhere a dictionary type listing of what all those > acronyms mean? Just something simple with lines like 'NTP Network > Time Protocol'. As tomas has said, you'll need to rely on multiple sources for that. (I'm not certain that SLUB is even an acronym; my understanding is that the original item in that category was referred to as "the slab allocator", where "slab" may have simply been in the sense of "contiguous, possibly-large chunk", and that there have been later-development alternatives referred to as "SLUB" and "SLOB" with possibly varying capitalization - and while I haven't seen an explicit explanation of the matter, my inference has been that these might be just change-the-vowel-but-keep-the-rest references to that original name. Or at the least carefully named to make it possible to keep the similarity of abbreviated name.) That said, there *is* a dictionary specifically for technical acronyms. It's called VERA, the Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms. It can be installed via the dict-vera package (and then accessed via the 'dict' command-line utility, with 'dict -d vera' if you explicitly want to exclude other dictionaries), and understand it to also be accessible online (at a URL shown along with the package description). It doesn't seem to help with most of the terms you listed, but it's been very helpful to me with many others in the past, so there's a decent chance it might help with others you didn't happen to list. > Thanks, > Mike > -- > Always remember: > It is a mathematical certainty that half the people > in this country are below average in intelligence! This doesn't actually quite hold; if the high end has enough high-enough outliers, or the low end enough low-end ones, the average can be well above or well below the actual 50% midpoint. If you had four people, with ratings of 3, 4, 6, and 7, the average would be 5, and half would indeed be below the average. If you added two more people, one with a rating of 5 (the existing average) and the other with a rating of 17 (an extreme outlier), the average would be 7 - and five out of the six would be below the new average. The overall point is still valid, however; it would just need to be phrased differently. I'm not having much success thinking of *how* to phrase it, but I think that might be because of how recently I woke up... -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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