It was a side effect of get_user_pages, which obtains durable references to pages that have to be explicitly dropped. These were held by the logging module independently of the processes interacting with it.

(The kernel thread was actually provide by a system call from user space. So there was a daemon as a user space program, but that just called into the kernel, where it then sat in a loop. This is nice: you have something in user space that you can kill with SIGTERM or whatever and restart by running some /usr/bin/executable.)

If the daemon terminated, that didn't destroy any of the buffers; they would just sit there getting backlogged. New ones could be created, too (via ioctl calls on a character device in /dev).

One aspect was that get_user_pages doesn't give you a linear block of memory. I wrote the grotty C code to dequeue messages from the non-linearly-mapped circular buffer. The message headers could straddle page boundaries, so I copied those out into temporaries before working with them. I think there was some attempt to avoid making unnecessary copies of the bulk data.