You should really read the whole paragraph -- that way of splitting the iovecs is not a hard requirement. It's only supposed to help in the case of a partial read, though it's not clear how it could help ;-)
That manpage is quite dubious and confusing; my testing shows that process_vm_readv() will always error out if the iov_start of the first iovec from the remote_iov list is not a valid address, but return a partial read if any of the pages spanned by iov_start + iov_len or the rest of the iovecs are not mapped in (which is expected and useful, but contradicts the emphasized parts below).
Note, however, that these system calls do not check the memory regions
in the remote process until just before doing the read/write. Consequently, a partial read/write (see RETURN VALUE) may result if one of
the remote_iov elements points to an invalid memory region in the
remote process. No further reads/writes will be attempted beyond that
point. Keep this in mind when attempting to read data of unknown
length (such as C strings that are null-terminated) from a remote
process, by avoiding spanning memory pages (typically 4KiB) in a single
remote iovec element. (Instead, split the remote read into two
remote_iov elements and have them merge back into a single write
local_iov entry. The first read entry goes up to the page boundary,
while the second starts on the next page boundary.)
[...]
This return
value may be less than the total number of requested bytes, if a partial read/write occurred. (Partial transfers apply at the granularity
of iovec elements. These system calls won't perform a partial transfer
that splits a single iovec element.)
