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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/kernel.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.