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authorTejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>2026-09-14 22:12:34 -1000
committerTejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>2026-09-15 06:57:20 -1000
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tree95807ff0e511c05602ef34808cfc660303309057 /Documentation/driver-api/driver-model/design-patterns.rst
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sched_ext: Maintain an online cid mask in the scheduler arenagrafted
Schedulers on the default cid mapping treat [0, nr_online_cids) as the online set and restart on hotplug. Schedulers that install their own mapping with scx_bpf_cid_override() have no way to learn which cids are online: the count no longer identifies members and the CPU-form cpumask is unusable from cid programs. This is an obvious hole in the cid API. Add scx_bpf_online_cmask(), a kernel-maintained cmask in the scheduler's arena, allocated alongside the per-CPU scratch masks and populated after the cid mapping is finalized and before ops.init(), for child schedulers too. The pointer stays valid through ops.exit() with no reference to take. It is the arena offset as a void pointer, the same form struct_ops arena arguments arrive in. The verifier types the void return as a scalar for the program's arena cast. The mask follows the SCX hotplug notifications: seeded from cpu_active_mask and updated before ops.cid_online/offline() runs, so it lags cpu_online_mask only inside a hotplug transition. Updates walk the scheduler list under the lock that also serializes unlinking. Reads are live, not atomic snapshots. Root initialization excludes hotplug. v2: Reworded the getter kerneldoc (Andrea Righi). Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Andrea Righi <arighi@nvidia.com>
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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.