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: Giedrius Statkevicius <giedriuswork@gmail.com>
Reported-by: Thierry Reding <thierry.reding@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Tom Van Braeckel <tomvanbraeckel@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>
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