[PATCH 0/4] kho: rename "scratch" to "bootmem"

Rob Herring robh at kernel.org
Mon Aug 17 07:52:31 PDT 2026


On Mon, Aug 17, 2026 at 10:42:00AM -0400, Gregory Price wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 06:26:36PM +0200, Pratyush Yadav wrote:
> > From: "Pratyush Yadav (Google)" <pratyush at kernel.org>
> > 
> > The term "KHO scratch" is vague and overloaded. It does not accurately
> > describe what the memory is for. This was discussed previously at [0].
> > The conclusion was to rename "KHO scratch" to "KHO bootmem", since this
> > is memory passed by the previous kernel for early boot allocations.
> > 
> 
> This seems like a lot of churn to just rename some stuff, especially for
> a term "scratch" which is very much understood to mean "temporary
> working memory region" in common computing parlance.
> 
> The boot param name change would also cause breakage for existing
> systems that update and depend on the scratch parameter.
> 
> Is there a non-verbiage reason to justify these changes?  Living with
> "scratch" seems better than potentially breaking folks.

I don't think these are the first breaking changes. And if the changes 
are fine, then that means more breaking changes are fine, too. So why is 
this upstream at all until the design is settled?

Rob



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