Following Criticism By Linus Torvalds, GenPD Subsystem Renamed To "pmdomain"

During the Linux 6.6 merge window a pull request submitted the new "GenPD" subsystem. While the pull request did land for Linux 6.6, Linus Torvalds took issue with it -- not because of the code but over the lack of clarity on what "GenPD" is for those not domain experts in this area. To help clear things up, GenPD is being renamed to "pmdomain" to provide a bit more clarity.

GenPD left Linus Torvalds "[trying] to figure out what the heck 'genpd' is" and argued its a poor acronym. GenPD is short for Generic Power Domains and is an abstraction within the Linux kernel for how power is controlled for components on a SoC. This abstraction can describe relationships between devices and power controllers.

Following the comments by Linus Torvalds and other upstream developers, a pull request was sent out today for renaming the GenPD subsystem to simply "pmdomain" for power management domain.

Ulf Hansson wrote in today's pull request:

"As discussed on LKML, using "genpd" as the name of a subsystem isn't very self-explanatory and the acronym itself that means Generic PM Domain, is known only by a limited group of people.

The suggestion to improve the situation is to rename the subsystem to "pmdomain", which there seems to be a good consensus around using too. Ideally it should indicate that its purpose is to manage Power Domains or "PM domains" as we often also use within the Linux Kernel terminology."

The code within the "drivers/genpd" directory have also been moved to "drivers/pmdomain" as part of this update.