Re: [PATCH] swiotlb: avoid double copy with swiotlb on tx socket

Re: [PATCH] swiotlb: avoid double copy with swiotlb on tx socket

[Mostafa Saleh]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2026 at 02:33:52AM +0200, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2026 at 2:25 AM Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:42:20 +0000 Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> > > The use of swiotlb causes an extra data copy on I/O.  For tx sockets,
> > > especially with greedy senders, this has a high chance of happening in
> > > the softirq handler for tx network interrupts, creating a significant
> > > performance bottleneck.
> >
> > What's the use case? I associate swiotlb with debug / testing mostly,
> > so it'd be useful for people like me to explain why you care.
> 
> Ah sorry, I forgot to mention.
> swiotlb is used in guest kernels for confidential computing VMs.
> Ordinary memory pages are encrypted and the host or devices
> have no way to decrypt them, so the kernel must use
> unencrypted bounce buffers to exchange data with I/O devices.

I started looking into the same problem recently, to reduce the
bouncing in protected KVM (pKVM) confidential guests.
My first attempt was to update dma_direct_map_phys() to skip
bouncing and do inline memory decryption (for pKVM that is a hypercall
which updates the stage-2 page tables), however, that was really slow
compared to the memcpy in bouncing even for massive pages.
My conclusion was similar that we need to solve this at construction
by making this memory allocated from a pre-decrypted pool (which
does not have to be part of the SWIOTLB)
My initial idea was to teach some of the kernel subsystems (SKB,
BLK, SLAB) about "CoCo allocators" that allocate decrypted memory,
as this is not a net specific problem.

I am still looking into this, I was planning to bring this up in the
upcoming LPC.
I will give this patch a try. However, I believe that we need a more
generalised concept for CoCo pre-decrypted allocators in the kernel.

Thanks,
Mostafa

> 
> cheers
> luigi
>