On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 11:42 AM Arjun Roy [off-list ref] wrote:

[...]

To summarize then, it seems to me that we're on the same page now.
I'll put together a tentative v3 such that:
1. It uses pre-charging, as previously discussed.
2. It uses a page flag to delineate pages of a certain networking sort
(ie. this mechanism).
3. It avails itself of up to 4 words of data inside struct page,
inside the networking specific struct.
4. And it sets up this opt-in lifecycle notification for drivers that
choose to use it, falling back to existing behaviour without.

Arjun, if you don't mind, can you explain how the lifetime of such a
page will look like?

For example:

Driver:
page = dev_alloc_page()
/* page has 1 ref */
dev_map_page(page)
/* I don't think dev_map_page() takes a ref on page, so the ref remains 1. */

On incoming traffic the page goes to skb and which then gets assigned
to a struct sock. Does the kernel increase refcnt of the page on these
operations?

The page gets mapped into user space which increments its refcnt.

After processing the data, the application unmaps the page and its
refcnt will be decremented.

__put_page() will be called when refcnt reaches 0, so, the initial
refcnt which the driver has acquired, has to be transferred to the
next layer. So, I am trying to understand how that will work?