Linux is moving away from master/slave and blacklist/whitelist terminology

Linux will also use more neutral terminology in code in the future. Developers of the OS are moving away from using terms like master/slave and blacklist/whitelist. Linus Torvalds approved a proposal for this. Several alternatives are available.

Linux lead developer Torvalds gives in a pull request of the Linux 5.8 kernel agrees to use the new terminology. It specifically concerns the terms master and slave in, for example, networks, and the terms whitelist and blacklist when it comes to authorization protocols.

There will be no universal alternative to the terms. The developers can choose different terms. For master/slave it concerns the alternatives:

• primary, main / secondary, replica, subordinate
• initiator, requester/target, responder
• controller, host/device, worker, proxy
• leader / follower
• director / performer

For blacklist/whitelist, denylist/allowlist and blocklist/passlist are allowed. Programmers can choose which terms to use.

The changes only apply to code written for Linux in the future. Old code will not be retroactively updated. There are exceptions for cases where developers update an existing api or kernel abi where the old terms are still needed.

Torvalds responds in the pull request to an offer that a developer did early this month. With the changes, Linux follows dozens of other software companies and developers who have started using different terminology. That started especially after the demonstrations in America around the death of George Floyd. Microsoft, GitHub, Google with Android, and software developers around Go, MySQL, Rust and PHP, among others, have therefore started to use more neutral terms.