Re: [PATCH v2] mm: alloc_pages_bulk: remove assumption of populating only NULL elements

[Yunsheng Lin]

On 2025/3/12 9:45, Gao Xiang wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2025/3/12 06:55, NeilBrown wrote:
>> On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, Gao Xiang wrote:
>>>
>>>    - Your new api covers narrow cases compared to the existing
>>>      api, although all in-tree callers may be converted
>>>      properly, but it increases mental burden of all users.
>>>      And maybe complicate future potential users again which
>>>      really have to "check NULL elements in the middle of page
>>>      bulk allocating" again.
>>
>> I think that the current API adds a mental burden for most users.  For
>> most users, their code would be much cleaner if the interface accepted
>> an uninitialised array with length, and were told how many pages had
>> been stored in that array.> A (very) few users benefit from the complexity.  So having two
>> interfaces, one simple and one full-featured, makes sense.

Thanks for the above clear summarization.

> 
> Ok, I think for this part, diferrent people has different
> perference on API since there is no absolutely right and
> wrong in the API design area.
> 
> But I have no interest to follow this for now.

Just to be clearer, as erofs seems to be able to be changed to
use a simple interface, do you prefer to keep using the full-featured
interface or change to use the simple interface?

> 
> Thanks,
> Gao Xiang