Proposing a mechanism for reliably locking VIA communication memory in Linux

The Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) is an industry standard specifying how user processes can access networking hardware directly in a protected manner. One characteristic of the VI Architecture is that it requires that all memory used for communication be locked down into physical memory. Above that, the VIA specification explicitly allows memory regions to be registered several times. However, all freely available VIA implementations for Linux either do not reliably lock the memory or they do not allow multiple registrations. We propose a mechanism for reliably locking VIA communication memory in Linux that meets all requirements. It is based on a recently introduced kernel mechanism, called kiobufs. Although the proposed locking mechanism has been developed for a VIA implementation it can be utilized for any type of user level communication.