On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 1:02 AM Takashi Iwai <ti...@suse.de> wrote: > > On Wed, 08 Jul 2020 20:14:27 +0200, > Dan Williams wrote: > > > > +Recommended replacements for 'blacklist/whitelist' are: > > + 'denylist / allowlist' > > + 'blocklist / passlist' > > I started looking through the tree now and noticed there are lots of > patterns like "whitelisted" or "blacklisted". How can the words fit > for those? Actually, there are two cases like: > > - Foo is blacklisted > - Allow to load the non-whitelisted cards > > Currently I'm replacing the former with "Foo is in denylist", but not > sure about the latter case. I thought Kees mentioned about this, but > don't remember the proposal...
Hmm. In these cases, we're trying to convey one of two things. A given device/platform/CPU/whatever could be known to be problematic and thus disallowed, or we could have a policy that we generally don't trust hardware but we have specific reason to believe that this particular hardware is okay. After doing a highly scientific sampling of a few cases, some of these are indeed lists and some are not. If we're going to look for new words for these concepts, perhaps we shouldn't focus on the *list* aspect -- after all, that's just a rather popular implementation detail, but it's not the core concept we're trying to express. As an example case, we have a horrible concept in which some Intel CPUs support a form of memory failure recovery, and there is no enumeration mechanism. Instead, there's a list (sigh). So we could say "your CPU is whitelisted for such-and-such," which at least gets the idea across, but saying "your CPU is allowlisted for such-and-such" seems like a stretch. It's not that we have a policy to allow things on the list -- it's that we think that CPUs not on the list simply don't have the relevant capability. Here are some brainstormed ideas: - Such-and-such feature is quirked off. (Or disabled due to a quirk.) - Your device is not on the known-good list. - Your device is not known-good. It might work anyway -- to try it, set such-and-such option. - Your device is known bad. - Your device is busted and we think you should pressure the manufacturer to fix it. - Your device is too old and no longer supported. - Seriously, you're trying to use an 80386 on a modern kernel? No thanks. We think it's neat that you still have one that works, though. - (Specifically for modules and not part of the Linux kernel tree) disable_autoload instead of blacklist, perhaps? Part of my point is that we use blacklist and whitelist to mean various things, and I don't think we should try to invent a couple of new catch-all terms to replace them. Perhaps replacing these words could be an opportunity to come up with better descriptions at the same time.
