Naming the "Task containers" framework

Serge E. Hallyn serue at us.ibm.com
Tue Sep 11 06:57:39 PDT 2007


Quoting Paul Menage (menage at google.com):
> At the mini-summit, and at other times, I've heard the repeated
> complaint that having the word "container" in the name of the "task
> container" framework leads to ambiguity. And separately from the
> complaints, I've seen the awkwardness that people end up with when
> they feel they have to distinguish between the "containers" abstract
> concept, and "Paul's containers" ...
> 
> With the hope/prospect of having the framework merged some time after
> the kernel summit, I guess now's a good time to bow to the pressure
> and find some compromise that everyone likes, before we actually hit
> mainline. (Maybe earlier would have been even better, but ...)
> 
> Of the various possible names that have been suggested, there are a
> couple that (to me) stand out as good options:
> 
> - control groups
> - task sets
> 
> The former (coined by Eric during a brainstorming session yesterday)
> seems to capture the enforcement aspect of the framework (sysadmin can
> use it to control the behaviour of processes, processes can't escape
> from groups), without suggesting that it can only be used for resource
> controllers (as some alternative names such as "resource groups"
> imply) and would be a choice that I could be happy with.
> 
> Does anyone have strong views on other alternative names (or even the
> idea of keeping "task containers")?

Purely subjectively I prefer control groups, but task sets is more
descriptive about the implementation.

So I'd have to vote for task sets.

I like 'task containers', but it really is a pain trying to keep clear
which containers I'm talking about from one sentence to the next.

-serge


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