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  • Tom Van Braeckel's avatar
    fuse: explicitly set /dev/fuse file's private_data · 94e4fe2c
    Tom Van Braeckel authored
    The misc subsystem (which is used for /dev/fuse) initializes private_data to
    point to the misc device when a driver has registered a custom open file
    operation, and initializes it to NULL when a custom open file operation has
    *not* been provided.
    
    This subtle quirk is confusing, to the point where kernel code registers
    *empty* file open operations to have private_data point to the misc device
    structure. And it leads to bugs, where the addition or removal of a custom open
    file operation surprisingly changes the initial contents of a file's
    private_data structure.
    
    So to simplify things in the misc subsystem, a patch [1] has been proposed to
    *always* set the private_data to point to the misc device, instead of only
    doing this when a custom open file operation has been registered.
    
    But before this patch can be applied we need to modify drivers that make the
    assumption that a misc device file's private_data is initialized to NULL
    because they didn't register a custom open file operation, so they don't rely
    on this assumption anymore. FUSE uses private_data to store the fuse_conn and
    errors out if this is not initialized to NULL at mount time.
    
    Hence, we now set a file's private_data to NULL explicitly, to be independent
    of whatever value the misc subsystem initializes it to by default.
    
    [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/12/4/939
    
    
    
    Reported-by: default avatarGiedrius Statkevicius <giedriuswork@gmail.com>
    Reported-by: default avatarThierry Reding <thierry.reding@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarTom Van Braeckel <tomvanbraeckel@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMiklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>
    94e4fe2c