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authorMuhammad Bilal <meatuni001@gmail.com>2026-07-28 17:54:55 +0500
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>2026-09-01 12:15:16 +0200
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treec38fd8fcf58e1937b17fdbc6518b6f8b797fc15a /Documentation/driver-api/driver-model/design-patterns.rst
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staging: rtl8723bs: fix OOB read in rtw_action_frame_parse()grafted
rtw_action_frame_parse() takes a frame_len parameter but never actually checks it before indexing into the frame body: const u8 *frame_body = frame + sizeof(struct ieee80211_hdr_3addr); ... c = frame_body[0]; ... a = frame_body[1]; frame_body already points 24 bytes (sizeof(struct ieee80211_hdr_3addr)) into frame, so reading frame_body[0] and frame_body[1] requires frame_len >= 26. A management action frame shorter than that (e.g. exactly 24 bytes, the minimum a malicious peer can send) causes a 1-2 byte out-of-bounds read. This is reachable from rtw_cfg80211_monitor_if_xmit_entry() and cfg80211_rtw_mgmt_tx() in ioctl_cfg80211.c, both of which pass attacker/user-influenced frame buffers and lengths straight through. Add the missing length check before frame_body is dereferenced. Fixes: 554c0a3abf216 ("staging: Add rtl8723bs sdio wifi driver") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Muhammad Bilal <meatuni001@gmail.com> Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260728125456.32359-3-meatuni001@gmail.com Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.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.