On Wed, 8 Jun 2022 10:27:15 +0200 Jiri Pirko wrote:

Wed, Jun 08, 2022 at 06:39:55AM CEST, kuba@kernel.org wrote:

quoted

Netdev reference helpers have a dev_ prefix for historic
reasons. Renaming the old helpers would be too much churn  

Hmm, I think it would be great to eventually rename the rest too in
order to maintain unique prefix for netdev things. Why do you think the
"churn" would be an issue?

Felt like we're better of moving everyone to the new tracking helpers
than doing just a pure rename. But I'm not opposed to a pure rename.

quoted

diff --git a/drivers/net/macsec.c b/drivers/net/macsec.c
index 817577e713d7..815738c0e067 100644
--- a/drivers/net/macsec.c
+++ b/drivers/net/macsec.c

@@ -3462,7 +3462,7 @@ static int macsec_dev_init(struct net_device *dev)

		memcpy(dev->broadcast, real_dev->broadcast, dev->addr_len);

	/* Get macsec's reference to real_dev */
-	dev_hold_track(real_dev, &macsec->dev_tracker, GFP_KERNEL);
+	netdev_hold(real_dev, &macsec->dev_tracker, GFP_KERNEL);  

So we later decide to rename dev_hold() to obey the netdev_*() naming
scheme, we would have collision.

dev_hold() should not be used in new code, we should use tracking
everywhere. Given that we can name the old helpers __netdev_hold().

Also, seems to me odd to have:
OLDPREFIX_x()
and
NEWPREFIX_x()
to be different functions.

For the sake of not making naming mess, could we rather have:
netdev_hold_track()
or
netdev_hold_tr() if the prior is too long
?

See above, one day non-track version should be removed.
IMO to encourage use of the track-capable API we could keep their names
short and call the legacy functions __netdev_hold() as I mentioned or
maybe netdev_hold_notrack().