On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 11:24:16AM -0800, Yu, Yu-cheng wrote: > Case (a) is a normal writable data page that has gone through fork(). So it Writable? > has W=0, D=1. But here, the software chooses not to use the D bit, and But it has W=0. So not writable? > instead, W=0, COW=1. So the "new" way of denoting that the page is modified is COW=1 *when* on CET hw. The D=1 bit is still used on the rest thus the two _PAGE_DIRTY_BITS. Am I close? > Case (b) is a normal read-only data page. Since it is read-only, fork() > won't affect it. In __get_user_pages(), a copy of the read-only page is > needed, and the page is duplicated. The software sets COW=1 for the new > copy. That makes more sense. > Thread-A is writing to a writable page, and the page's PTE is becoming W=1, > D=1. In the middle of it, Thread-B is changing the PTE to W=0. Yah, add that to the explanation pls. -- Regards/Gruss, Boris. https://people.kernel.org/tglx/notes-about-netiquette