On Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:29:36 -0800 Bobby Eshleman wrote:

quoted

IDK if the cmsg approach is still right for this flow TBH.
IIRC when Stan talked about this a while back we were considering doing
this via Netlink. Anything that proves that the user owns the binding
would work. IIUC the TCP socket in this design just proves that socket
has received a token from a given binding right?  

In both designs the owner of the binding starts of as the netlink opener,
and then ownership spreads out to TCP sockets as packets are steered to
them. Tokens are received by the user which gives them a share in the
form of references on the pp and binding. This design follows the same
approach... but I may be misinterpreting what you mean by ownership?

What I was getting at was the same point about socket A vs socket B as
I made on the doc patch. IOW the kernel only tracks how many tokens it
gave out for a net_iov, there's no socket state beyond the binding
pointer. Right?