Having written device drivers before, the first thing I wondered was how he allocated a fixed region of physical memory in user space... "In kernel space there

Having written device drivers before, the first thing I wondered was how he allocated a fixed region of physical memory in user space... "In kernel space there is an API to allocate DMA memory, in user space we have to use other mechanisms since this API is not available here. To disable swapping, we can use mlock(2). [...] However, mlock(2) only ensures that the page is kept in memory. The kernel is still able to move pages to different physical addresses. To circumvent this problem, we use huge pages with a size of 2 MiB. These pages cannot be migrated yet by the Linux kernel, thus stay resident in physical memory." He didn't, he's depending on an implementation quirk which might change in the future (and also depending on the physical memory backing huge pages being in a region which can be reached by the network device through DMA, though that's probably always true on x86 when memory encryption is not in use).