Re: [PATCH] mm: Decline to manipulate the refcount on a slab page

[Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 04:46:45PM +0100, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
> On 3/11/25 11:15, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> > On Mon, 10 Mar 2025 14:35:24 +0000 Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) wrote:
> > > Long-term, networking needs to stop taking a refcount on the pages that
> > > it uses and rely on the caller to hold whatever references are necessary
> > > to make the memory stable.
> > 
> > TBH I'm not clear on who is going to fix this.
> > IIRC we already told NVMe people that sending slab memory over sendpage
> > is not well supported. Plus the bug is in BPF integration, judging by
> > the stack traces (skmsg is a BPF thing). Joy.
> 
> Hmm. Did you? Seem to have missed it.
> We make sure to not do it via the 'sendpage_ok()' call; but other than
> that it's not much we can do.
> 
> And BPF is probably not the culprit; issue here is that we have a kvec,
> package it into a bio (where it gets converted into a bvec),
> and then call an iov iterator in tls_sw to get to the pages.
> But at that stage we only see the bvec iterator, and the information
> that it was an kvec to start with has been lost.

So I have two questions:

Hannes:
 - Why does nvme need to turn the kvec into a bio rather than just
   send it directly?
Jakub:
 - Why does the socket code think it needs to get a refcount on a bvec
   at all, since the block layer doesn't?