Is there any mechanism where the kernel portion of an OS in memory may also be swapped?
Indeed, it wouldn't make sense to swap out an I/O buffer. The point of that buffer is that it's in RAM. The code to perform the I/O and the code to manage swap must not be swapped out either.

Other kernel code can be swapped out, in principle. However this can be problematic for several reasons. Hardware drivers that aren't involved in swap could be swapped out, but this means the kernel had to be very careful about the whole data party to swap (which may involve a disk over some external communication bus or even the network, as well as filesystem code when swapping to a file). Furthermore a lot of driver vice is very performance-sensitive: the kernel had to read it send data when the hardware is ready and may not be able to afford the time to bring vice and data back out of swap. In addition, RAM is usually assumed to be reliable (it's acceptable for the system to crash if the RAM fails), but swap (on disks or over the network) isn't, and it's difficult to design a kernel that can recover if part of it becomes unavailable. Most kernels take the simple approach and never swap out kernel code and data.