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'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: magic on June 24, 2020, 05:35:53 am ---
--- Quote from: EEVblog on June 23, 2020, 10:57:13 pm ---And even if you removed the words master and slave from every one of those 600+ pages, you'd still have MISO and MOSI embedded in documentation and source code and PCB silkscreens etc.
--- End quote ---
There is literally nothing socially injust about microcontroller in sensor out :-//
Join the revolution, comrade!
That's why this change is needed. Technical terms should reflect technical reality, not be references to abhorrent practices of white people.
--- End quote ---
The technical reality they should reflect is that not all slave devices are sensors, and not all master devices are microcontrollers.
magic:
Explain it to those makers ::) :P ;D
It's good enough for them. And if you have something that's not a sensor, just change your silkscreen already :=\
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: magic on June 24, 2020, 05:35:53 am ---There is literally nothing socially injust about microcontroller in sensor out
--- End quote ---
Except miso is obviously cultural appropriation.
--- Quote from: tggzzz on June 24, 2020, 05:44:49 am ---not all slave devices are sensors, and not all master devices are microcontrollers.
--- End quote ---
Very true. I've been looking at ARM Cortex microcontrollers with lots of SRAM that expose a GPIO port with about 20 contiguous pins for parallel DMA to a display, and playing with tricky ways to generate the write strobe; essentially making both the microcontroller and the display slaved to an externally generated write strobe pulse train. (Something like a gated PWM or somesuch, so that the exact number of pulses can be controlled. In my case, rising edge would trigger the DMA, and falling edge the display parallel input latch/strobe. Or vice versa.) I'd be very surprised if this is unusual or rare in any way.
Just don't ask me to invent the terms to describe each part in a social justice / racially sensitive way. My language skills fail even worse than my electronics skills.
magic:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 24, 2020, 06:06:03 am ---
--- Quote from: magic on June 24, 2020, 05:35:53 am ---There is literally nothing socially injust about microcontroller in sensor out
--- End quote ---
Except miso is obviously cultural appropriation.
--- End quote ---
|O
But look, maybe it actually is better that way. Why should we stick to some generic terms like miso/mosi and master/slave if we could come up with more meaningful names appropriate to circumstances? What does it really tell me that some SPI memory is a "slave"? What if this memory contains firmware for an MCU, shouldn't the memory be considered the "master" in this relationship, problematic as it sounds?
Those terms not only are offensive, they aren't even that helpful. I think for SPI we could adopt "externally clocked" and "internally clocked". The pins could be called "memory in" and "memory out" on a flash chip, while any clock donor driving the memory would have its own pin names, according to its diverse needs and circumstances. Note how "clock donor" is much better than "master" because it implies sharing rather than domination.
The software industry already pursues a meaningful naming policy, maybe we just need to make sensitivity specifications part of agile methodology and bring agile to EE at last?
Sounds like a topic for somebody's PhD :popcorn:
tom66:
A master device initiates the transaction. It controls everything, reads and writes, hence the word 'master'.
A slave device never initiates the transaction. It responds only to master, either to return read data or to complete a write. In some cases, no read data is returned, and the device only accepts writes. And, there are a few devices that only return read data and ignore writes.
The terms "microcontroller in/sensor out" are not an accurate description. The closest ones are something along the lines of "initiator out/target in" or "controller out/responder in". But these are clunky,
master/slave perfectly describes the arrangement, and it isn't intended to be offensive.
When it comes to an SPI flash, no, the 'slave' flash device is not a master no matter the data it stores. Does the flash ever boot the MCU? No. The MCU reads the flash in order to execute code or do something with that code. If the flash memory had a 'brain' and could actually start controlling the bus, you might have a point. But, it does not.
Do we have documentation of someone who is actually black who finds the terms offensive? Rather than some pasty-white college students who have written a paper about how black people should find something offensive, because it seems most SJWs just want to role-play for minorities sometimes.
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