Re: [PATCH 5/5] CUSE: implement CUSE - Character device inUserspace

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Sat Nov 22 2008 - 00:16:54 EST


On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:23:03 +0900 Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> CUSE enables implementing character devices in userspace. With recent
> additions of nonblock, lseek, ioctl and poll support, FUSE already has
> most of what's necessary to implement character devices. All CUSE has
> to do is bonding all those components - FUSE, chardev and the driver
> model - nicely.
>
> Due to the number of different objects involved and many ways an
> instance can fail, object lifetime rules are a tad bit complex.
> Please take a look at the comment on top of fs/fuse/cuse.c for
> details.
>
> Other than that, it's mostly straight forward. Client opens
> /dev/cuse, kernel starts conversation with CUSE_INIT. The client
> tells CUSE which device it wants to create. CUSE creates the device
> for the client and the rest works the same way as in a direct IO FUSE
> session.
>
> Each CUSE device has a corresponding directory /sys/class/cuse/DEVNAME
> (which is symlink to /sys/devices/virtual/class/DEVNAME if
> SYSFS_DEPRECATED is turned off) which hosts "waiting" and "abort"
> among other things. Those two files have the same meaning as the FUSE
> control files.
>
> The only notable lacking feature compared to in-kernel implementation
> is mmap support.
>
> ...
>
> +struct cuse_conn {
> + struct fuse_conn fc;
> + struct cdev cdev;
> + struct vfsmount *mnt;
> + struct device *dev;
> +
> + /* init parameters */
> + bool unrestricted_ioctl:1;

I'd suggest removal of the :1 here. If someone later comes along and
adds another bitfield next to it, locking will be needed to prevent
racess accessing the bitfields, and I seeno appropriate lock here, nor
any comment explaining the locking..

> +static int cuse_init_worker(void *data)
> +{
> + struct cuse_init_in iin = { };
> + struct cuse_init_out iout = { };
> + struct cuse_devinfo devinfo = { };

You might want to check the generated code here. gcc has a habit of
assembling a temp structure on the stack then memcpying it over, which
is just junk. This will be gcc version dependent. Fixable by using an
old-fashioned memset instead.

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