[LinuxBIOS] [OT]Using KiB instead of KB in linuxbios

[Peter Stuge]

Hi shirish,

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 08:49:52AM +0530, shirish wrote:
>       I'm no developer but just a simple user. One thing which would
> be nice to see is having explicit nomenclature to say 1024 bytes
> instead of confusion between 1000 bytes & 1024 bytes.

Not so off-topic.

I just suggested the very same thing for a help message in lar, a
utility to be used with v3 of LB. That is; to explicity state 1024
rather than abbreviating it with K.


> While all the developers may be able to differentiate or know when
> any kind of testing takes place on general motherboards it would
> arise in difficulties. If however you guys took the KiB it makes
> things that much more simpler for everybody to understand. Dunno if
> you guys use the nomenclature internally or not.

For all our purposes except one, the multipliers are always 1024 and
1024*1024=1048576, and never 1000 and 1000000.

No rule without an exception I guess. For time or frequencies, e.g.
CPU MHz, M always means 1000000 and k always means 1000.

Sometimes we can be sloppy with m vs. M too. m means milli and M
means mega. But since milli is less than 1 it is usually clear from
context that it is not applicable. For example with memory - it's not
possible to have less than 1 byte of memory, so 1mb must mean
megabyte even though it is strictly 1 millibyte. (1/1000 byte)

Thanks for pointing this out. We should fix any and all ambiguities.

I've filed a ticket in trac.


//Peter