Re: [RFC: DMA_PMD 00/22] DMA_PMD: PMD_SIZE-backed IO buffer pools

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Fri, Nov 06, 2026 at 10:00:35AM -0800, Naman Gulati wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2026 at 9:31 AM Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Nov 06, 2026 at 09:21:08AM -0800, Naman Gulati wrote:
> > > I drafted an implementation [1] for premapped TX and RX buffers on top
> > > of the existing networking page_pool. It is implemented entirely in
> > > the networking layer and extends page_pool as the default RX
> > > allocator, to the TX path. There are no hooks in the IOMMU, DMA or
> > > page allocator code. I wanted to understand if this implementation
> > > correctly captured the feedback on this thread. Key components of this
> > > design:
> > >
> > > - Chunks: as in Luigi's series, memory comes in 2 MiB chunks, but each
> > > chunk is mapped once per opted-in device through the DMA API and
> > > records its IOVA for each device, rather than using a shared IOVA
> > > window.
> > >
> > > - TX: page_pool accepts a memory provider for pools that are not bound
> > > to an RX queue. Per-CPU page_pools take 32 KiB pages from the chunks
> > > of their NUMA node; TCP copies sendmsg() data into them through the
> > > task page_frag and allocates its skb heads from them.
> > >
> > > - RX: an instance of the same memory provider, sharing the chunk code,
> > > backs RX queue page_pools. RX chunks of order-0 pages belong to one
> > > device and NUMA node, and are shared by that device's queues on the
> > > node.
> > >
> > > [1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/compare/master...NamanGulati:linux:netdev_dma_pool
> >
> > IMHO the netstack should never read from shared/decrypted memory. If
> > you put it in a SKB you have to be sure the only touch after that
> > point will be a DMA read from an untrusted device on the TX side
> > (sending it to a trusted device would be a fail) and the final copy to
> > userspace on the RX side.
> 
> That's likely a fair callout. TBH I'm not very familiar with CoCo and
> will spend some time understanding the constraints. I kept CoCo out of
> my implementation as I approached this solution from the overcommitted
> VM problem where we are trying to overcommit memory in VMs and use
> these pre-mapped pages to avoid using bounce buffers.

Why does overcomitted VM use bounce buffers? Do you mean this is
about getting better memory clustering in page pool since the VM
paging granule is 2M?

Jason