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authorNiklas Cassel <cassel@kernel.org>2026-09-16 15:00:32 +0200
committerNiklas Cassel <cassel@kernel.org>2026-09-16 16:18:00 +0200
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ata: libata-scsi: fix ata_dsm_trim_pages() kernel-docgrafted
make htmldocs fails with: Documentation/driver-api/libata:604: ./drivers/ata/libata-scsi.c:2301: ERROR: Unexpected indentation. [docutils] The Return: section of ata_dsm_trim_pages() ends its first sentence with a colon and continues with an indented bullet list. reStructuredText requires a blank line before an indented block, so docutils chokes on the list. Simply adding the missing blank line does not work either: Return: is a kernel-doc "special section", which is terminated by the first blank line, so the bullet list would end up in the Description section, detached from the sentence introducing it. Spell the two bounds out as prose instead, so that the Return: section stays self-contained. Documentation-only change. Fixes: e64e6b5dc867 ("ata: libata-scsi: scale DSM TRIM payload by MAX PAGES PER DSM COMMAND") Reported-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-ide/b0a0b8e8-cc4f-4c7b-8bc5-fee0712d405a@redhat.com/ Reviewed-by: Damien Le Moal <dlemoal@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260916130031.29990-2-cassel@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Niklas Cassel <cassel@kernel.org>
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+=============================
+Device Driver Design Patterns
+=============================
+
+This document describes a few common design patterns found in device drivers.
+It is likely that subsystem maintainers will ask driver developers to
+conform to these design patterns.
+
+1. State Container
+2. container_of()
+
+
+1. State Container
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+While the kernel contains a few device drivers that assume that they will
+only be probed() once on a certain system (singletons), it is custom to assume
+that the device the driver binds to will appear in several instances. This
+means that the probe() function and all callbacks need to be reentrant.
+
+The most common way to achieve this is to use the state container design
+pattern. It usually has this form::
+
+ struct foo {
+ spinlock_t lock; /* Example member */
+ (...)
+ };
+
+ static int foo_probe(...)
+ {
+ struct foo *foo;
+
+ foo = devm_kzalloc(dev, sizeof(*foo), GFP_KERNEL);
+ if (!foo)
+ return -ENOMEM;
+ spin_lock_init(&foo->lock);
+ (...)
+ }
+
+This will create an instance of struct foo in memory every time probe() is
+called. This is our state container for this instance of the device driver.
+Of course it is then necessary to always pass this instance of the
+state around to all functions that need access to the state and its members.
+
+For example, if the driver is registering an interrupt handler, you would
+pass around a pointer to struct foo like this::
+
+ static irqreturn_t foo_handler(int irq, void *arg)
+ {
+ struct foo *foo = arg;
+ (...)
+ }
+
+ static int foo_probe(...)
+ {
+ struct foo *foo;
+
+ (...)
+ ret = request_irq(irq, foo_handler, 0, "foo", foo);
+ }
+
+This way you always get a pointer back to the correct instance of foo in
+your interrupt handler.
+
+
+2. container_of()
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+Continuing on the above example we add an offloaded work::
+
+ struct foo {
+ spinlock_t lock;
+ struct workqueue_struct *wq;
+ struct work_struct offload;
+ (...)
+ };
+
+ static void foo_work(struct work_struct *work)
+ {
+ struct foo *foo = container_of(work, struct foo, offload);
+
+ (...)
+ }
+
+ static irqreturn_t foo_handler(int irq, void *arg)
+ {
+ struct foo *foo = arg;
+
+ queue_work(foo->wq, &foo->offload);
+ (...)
+ }
+
+ static int foo_probe(...)
+ {
+ struct foo *foo;
+
+ foo->wq = create_singlethread_workqueue("foo-wq");
+ INIT_WORK(&foo->offload, foo_work);
+ (...)
+ }
+
+The design pattern is the same for an hrtimer or something similar that will
+return a single argument which is a pointer to a struct member in the
+callback.
+
+container_of() is a macro defined in <linux/container_of.h>
+
+What container_of() does is to obtain a pointer to the containing struct from
+a pointer to a member by a simple subtraction using the offsetof() macro from
+standard C, which allows something similar to object oriented behaviours.
+Notice that the contained member must not be a pointer, but an actual member
+for this to work.
+
+We can see here that we avoid having global pointers to our struct foo *
+instance this way, while still keeping the number of parameters passed to the
+work function to a single pointer.