Exit words master/slave from our code

© ASTRON

In software and electronics we often borrow words from our daily lives to name technical relations, for example male/female (connector) mother/daughter (board), client/server, parent/child. About a year ago we became aware, that we also use the words master/slave in our code for the FPGAs. There is a movement in industry to phase out these words (https://www.oshwa.org/a-resolution-to-redefine-spi-signal-names) and we decided to join that movement.

We also noted that it is important but not urgent. Therefore I made a Jira ticket for it (https://support.astron.nl/jira/browse/L2SDP-112), so we would keep it on our radar and gather ideas on how to do the change with minimal effort and risk of introducing a bug.

Instead of master/slave we now use controller/peripheral for new code. Old code that we still use we keep as it is, but we connect to it using the new names. This is possible because in VHDL firmware code one can define an alias type, so that we can connect a signal of type t_controller/t_peripheral to deprecated type t_master/t_slave. In our Python software we already used the word peripheral to indicate a group of slaves that belong together. There we chose to rename the word slave into the word mm_port.

Now the Jira ticket is done. It took us minimal effort, because we solved it by putting it on our agenda, by letting it linger in our minds and by addressing it in steps.