On Sat, 22 Jan 2005, Paul Mackerras wrote:

Christoph's patch is bigger than it needs to be because he has to
change all the occurrences of clear_page(x) to clear_page(x, 0), and
then he has to change a lot of architectures' clear_page functions to
be called _clear_page instead.  If he picked a different name for the
"clear a higher order page" function it would end up being less
invasive as well as less confusing.

I had the name "zero_page" in V1 and V2 of the patch where it was
separate. Then someone complained about code duplication.

The argument that clear_page is called that because it clears a higher
order page won't wash; all the clear_page implementations in his patch
are perfectly capable of clearing any contiguous set of 2^order pages
(oops, I mean "zero-order pages"), not just a "higher order page".

clear_page is called clear_page because it clears one page of *any* order
not just higher orders. zero-order pages are not segregated nor are they
intrisincally better just because they contain more memory ;-).
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