Re: [PATCH] treewide: Rename "unencrypted" to "decrypted"

From: Dave Hansen
Date: Tue Mar 17 2020 - 17:25:02 EST


On 3/17/20 2:06 PM, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 01:35:12PM -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:
>> On 3/17/20 4:18 AM, Borislav Petkov wrote:
>>> Back then when the whole SME machinery started getting mainlined, it
>>> was agreed that for simplicity, clarity and sanity's sake, the terms
>>> denoting encrypted and not-encrypted memory should be "encrypted" and
>>> "decrypted". And the majority of the code sticks to that convention
>>> except those two. So rename them.
>> Don't "unencrypted" and "decrypted" mean different things?
>>
>> Unencrypted to me means "encryption was never used for this data".
>>
>> Decrypted means "this was/is encrypted but here is a plaintext copy".
> Maybe but linguistical semantics is not the point here.
>
> The idea is to represent a "binary" concept of memory being encrypted
> or memory being not encrypted. And at the time we decided to use
> "encrypted" and "decrypted" for those two things.

Yeah, agreed. We're basically trying to name "!encrypted".

> Do you see the need to differentiate a third "state", so to speak, of
> memory which was never encrypted?

No, there are just two states. I just think the "!encrypted" case
should not be called "decrypted".