TLDR

It is a matter of debate among language lawyers as to whether programs using container_of are strictly conforming, but pragmatists using the container_of idiom are in good company and are unlikely to run into issues running programs compiled with mainstream tool chains on mainstream hardware. In other words:

• strictly conforming: debated
• conforming: yes, for all practical purposes, in most situations

What can be said today

1. There is no language in the standard C17 standard that unambiguously requires support for the container_of idiom.
2. There are defect reports that suggest the standard intends to allow implementations room to forbid the container_of idiom by tracking “provenance” (i.e. the valid bounds) of objects along with pointers. However, these alone are not normative.
3. There is recent activity in the C memory object model study group that aims to provide more rigor to this and similar questions. See Clarifying the C memory object model – N2012 from 2016, Pointers are more abstract than you might expect from 2018, and A Provenance-aware Memory Object Model for C – N2676 from 2021.

Depending on when you read this, there may be newer documents available at the WG14 document log. Additionally, Peter Sewell collects related reference material here: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/cerberus/. These documents do not change what a strictly conforming program is today (in 2021, for versions C17 and older), but they suggest that the answer may change in newer versions of the standard.

Background

What is the container_of idiom?

This code demonstrates the idiom by expanding the contents of the macro usually seen implementing the idiom:

#include <stddef.h>

struct foo {
    long first;
    short second;
};

void container_of_idiom(void) {
    struct foo f;

    char* b = (char*)&f.second;        /* Line A */
    b -= offsetof(struct foo, second); /* Line B */
    struct foo* c = (struct foo*)b;    /* Line C */
}

In the above case, a container_of macro would typically take a short* argument intended to point to the second field of a struct foo. It would also take arguments for struct foo and second, and would expand to an expression returning struct foo*. It would employ the logic seen in lines A-C above.

The question is: is this code strictly conforming?

First, let’s define “strictly conforming”

C17 4 (5-7) Conformance

5. A strictly conforming program shall use only those features of the language and library specified in this International Standard. It shall not produce output dependent on any unspecified, undefined, or implementation-defined behavior, and shall not exceed any minimum implementation limit.

6. […] A conforming hosted implementation shall accept any strictly conforming program. […] A conforming implementation may have extensions (including additional library functions), provided they do not alter the behavior of any strictly conforming program.

7. A conforming program is one that is acceptable to a conforming implementation.

(For brevity I omitted the definition of “freestanding” implementations, as it concerns limitations on the standard library not relevant here.)

From this we see that strict conformance is quite strict, but a conforming implementation is allowed to define additional behavior as long as it does not alter the behavior of a strictly conforming program. In practice, almost all implementations do this; this is the “practical” definition that most C programs are written against.

For the purposes of this answer I’ll contain my answer to strictly conforming programs, and talk about merely conforming programs at the end.

Defect reports

The language standard itself is somewhat unclear on the question, but several defect reports shed more light on the issue.

DR 51

DR 51 ask questions of this program:

#include <stdlib.h>

struct A {
    char x[1];
};

int main() {
    struct A *p = (struct A *)malloc(sizeof(struct A) + 100);
    p->x[5] = '?'; /* This is the key line */
    return p->x[5];
}

The response to the DR includes (emphasis mine):

Subclause 6.3.2.1 describes limitations on pointer arithmetic, in connection with array subscripting. (See also subclause 6.3.6.) Basically, it permits an implementation to tailor how it represents pointers to the size of the objects they point at. Thus, the expression p->x[5] may fail to designate the expected byte, even though the malloc call ensures that the byte is present. The idiom, while common, is not strictly conforming.

Here we have the first indication that the standard allows implementations to “tailor” pointer representations based on the objects pointed at, and that pointer arithmetic that “leaves” the valid range of the original object pointed to is not strictly conforming.

DR 72 ask questions of this program:

#include <stddef.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

typedef double T;
struct hacked {
    int size;
    T data[1];
};

struct hacked *f(void)
{
    T *pt;
    struct hacked *a;
    char *pc;

    a = malloc(sizeof(struct hacked) + 20 * sizeof(T));
    if (a == NULL) return NULL;
    a->size = 20;

    /* Method 1 */
    a->data[8] = 42; /* Line A /*

   /* Method 2 */
    pt = a->data;
    pt += 8; /* Line B /*
    *pt = 42;

    /* Method 3 */
    pc = (char *)a;
    pc += offsetof(struct hacked, data);
    pt = (T *)pc; /* Line C */
    pt += 8;      /* Line D */
    *pt = 6 * 9;
    return a;
}

Astute readers will notice that /* Method 3 */ above is much like the container_of idiom. I.e. it takes a pointer to a struct type, converts it to char*, does some pointer arithmetic that takes the char* outside the range of the original struct, and uses the pointer.

The committee responded by saying /* Line C */ was strictly conforming but /* Line D */ was not strictly conforming by the same argument given for DR 51 above. Further, the committee said that the answers “are not affected if T has char type.”

Verdict: container_of is not strictly conforming (probably)

The container_of idiom takes a pointer to a struct’s subobject, converts the pointer to char*, and performs pointer arithmetic that moves the pointer outside the subobject. This is the same set of operations discussed in DR 51 and 72 apply. There is clear intent on the part of the committee. They hold that the standard “permits an implementation to tailor how it represents pointers to the size of the objects they point at” and thus “the idiom, while common, is not strictly conforming.“

One might argue that container_of side steps the issue by doing the pointer arithmetic in the domain of char* pointers, but the committee says the answer is “not affected if T has char type.“

May the container_of idiom be used in practice?

No, if you want to be strict and use only code that is not clearly strictly conforming according to current language standards.

Yes, if you are a pragmatist and believe that an idiom widely used in Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows C code is enough to label the idiom conforming in practice.

As noted above, implementations are allowed to guarantee behavior in ways not required by the standard. On a practical note, the container_of idiom is used in the Linux kernel and many other projects. It is easy for implementations to support on modern hardware. Various “sanitizer” systems such as Address Sanitizer, Undefined Behavior Sanitizer, Purify, Valgrind, etc., all allow this behavior. On systems with flat address spaces, and even segmented ones, various “pointer games” are common (e.g. converting to integral values and masking off low order bits to find page boundaries, etc). These techniques are so common in C code today that it is very unlikely that such idioms will cease to function on any commonly supported system now or in the future.

In fact, I found one implementation of a bounds checker that gives a different interpretation of C semantics in its paper. The quotes are from the following paper: Richard W. M. Jones and Paul H. J. Kelly. Backwards-compatible bounds checking for arrays and pointers in C programs. In Third International Workshop on Automated Debugging (editors M. Kamkarand D. Byers), volume 2 (1997), No. 009 of Linköping Electronic Articles in Computer and Information Science. Linköping University Electronic Press, Linköping, Sweden. ISSN 1401-9841, May 1997 pp. 13–26. URL http://www.ep.liu.se/ea/cis/1997/009/02/

ANSI C conveniently allows us to define an object as the fundamental unit of memory allocation. […] Operations are permitted which manipulate pointers within objects, but pointer operations are not permitted to cross between two objects. There is no ordering defined between objects, and the programmer should never be allowed to make assumptions about how objects are arranged in memory.

Bounds checking is not blocked or weakened by the use of a cast (i.e. type coercion). Cast can properly be used to change the type of the object to which a pointer refers, but cannot be used to turn a pointer to one object into a pointer to another. A corollary is that bounds checking is not type checking: it does not prevent storage from being declared with one data structure and used with another. More subtly, note that for this reason, bounds checking in C cannot easily validate use of arrays of structs which contain arrays in turn.

Every valid pointer-valued expression in C derives its result from exactly one original storage object. If the result of the pointer calculation refers to a different object, it is invalid.
This language is quite definitive but take note the paper was published in 1997, before the DR reports above were written and responded to. The best way to interpret the bounds checking system described in the paper is as a conforming implementation of C, but not one that detects all non-strictly conforming programs. I do see similarities between this paper and A Provenance-aware Memory Object Model for C – N2676 from 2021, however, so in the future the ideas similar to the ones quoted above might be codified in the language standard.

The C memory object model study group is a treasure trove of discussions related to container_of and many other closely related problems. From their mailing list archive we have these mentions of the container_of idiom:

2.5.4 Q34 Can one move among the members of a struct using representation-pointer arithmetic and casts?

The standard is ambiguous on the interaction between the allowable pointer arithmetic (on unsigned char* representation pointers) and subobjects. For example, consider:

Example cast_struct_inter_member_1.c

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stddef.h>
typedef struct { float f; int i; } st;
int main() {
  st s = {.f=1.0, .i=1};
  int *pi = &(s.i);
  unsigned char *pci = ((unsigned char *)pi);
  unsigned char *pcf = (pci - offsetof(st,i))
    + offsetof(st,f);
  float *pf = (float *)pcf;
  *pf = 2.0;  // is this free of undefined behaviour?
  printf("s.f=%f *pf=%f  s.i=%i\n",s.f,*pf,s.i);
}

This forms an unsigned char* pointer to the second member (i) of a struct, does arithmetic on that using offsetof to form an unsigned char* pointer to the first member, casts that into a pointer to the type of the first member (f), and uses that to write.

In practice we believe that this is all supported by most compilers and it is used in practice, e.g. as in the Container idiom of Chisnall et al. [ASPLOS 2015], where they discuss container macros that take a pointer to a structure member and compute a pointer to the structure as a whole. They see it heavily used by one of the example programs they studied. We are told that Intel’s MPX compiler does not support the container macro idiom, while Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows all rely on it.

The standard says (6.3.2.3p7): “…When a pointer to an object is converted to a pointer to a character type, the result points to the lowest addressed byte of the object. Successive increments of the result, up to the size of the object, yield pointers to the remaining bytes of the object.”. This licenses the construction of the unsigned char* pointer pci to the start of the representation of s.i (presuming that a structure member is itself an “object”, which itself is ambiguous in the standard), but allows it to be used only to access the representation of s.i.

The offsetof definition in stddef.h, 7.19p3, ” offsetof(type,member-designator) which expands to an integer constant expression that has type size_t, the value of which is the offset in bytes, to the structure member (designated by member-designator, from the beginning of its structure (designated by type”, implies that the calculation of pcf gets the correct numerical address, but does not say that it can be used, e.g. to access the representation of s.f. As we saw in the discussion of provenance, in a post-DR260 world, the mere fact that a pointer has the correct address does not necessarily mean that it can be used to access that memory without giving rise to undefined behaviour.

Finally, if one deems pcf to be a legitimate char* pointer to the representation of s.f, then the standard says that it can be converted to a pointer to any object type if sufficiently aligned, which for float* it will be. 6.3.2.3p7: “A pointer to an object type may be converted to a pointer to a different object type. If the resulting pointer is not correctly aligned (68) for the referenced type, the behavior is undefined. Otherwise, when converted back again, the result shall compare equal to the original pointer….”. But whether that pointer has the right value and is usable to access memory is left unclear.

This example should be allowed in our de facto semantics but is not clearly allowed in the ISO text.

What needs to be changed in the ISO text to clarify this?

More generally, the ISO text’s use of “object” is unclear: does it refer to an allocation, or are struct members, union members, and array elements also “objects”?

Key phrase being “This example should be allowed in our de facto semantics but is not clearly allowed in the ISO text.” i.e. I take this to mean the the group documenets like N2676 wish to see container_of supported.

However, in a later message:

2.2 Provenance and subobjects: container-of casts

A key question is whether one can cast from a pointer to the first member of a struct to the struct as a whole, and then use that to access other members. We discussed it previously in N2222 Q34 Can one move among the members of a struct using representation-pointer arithmetic and casts?, N2222 Q37 Are usable pointers to a struct and to its first member interconvertable?, N2013, and N2012. Some of us had thought that that was uncontroversially allowed in ISO C, by 6.7.2.1p15 …A pointer to a structure object, suitably converted, points to its initial member…, and vice versa…, but others disagree. In practice, this seems to be common in real code, in the “container-of” idiom.

Though someone suggested that the IBM XL C/C++ compiler does not support it. Clarification from WG14 and compiler teams would be very helpful on this point.

With this, the group sums it up nicely: the idiom is widely used, but there is disagreement about what the standard says about it.