Re: [PATCH 05/14] fs: don't allow kernel reads and writes without iter ops

[Eric Biggers]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2020 at 06:03:31PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2020 at 3:06 PM Eric Biggers <ebiggers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > It's a bit unintuitive that ppos=NULL means "use pos 0", not "use file->f_pos".
> 
> That's not at all what it means.
> 
> A NULL ppos means "this has no position at all", and is what we use
> for FMODE_STREAM file descriptors (ie sockets, pipes, etc).
> 
> It also means that we don't do the locking for position updates.
> 
> The fact that "ki_pos" gets set to zero is just because it needs to be
> _something_. It shouldn't actually ever be used for stream devices.
> 

Okay, that makes more sense.  So the patchset from Matthew
https://lkml.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20201003025534.21045-1-willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/T/#u
isn't what you had in mind.

- Eric