On Tue, 2023-02-21 at 09:38 +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote: > Again, I'd not specialize on COW in all patches to much (IMHO, it > creates more confusion than it actually helps for understanding > what's > happening) and just call it a read-only PTE that is dirty. Simple as > that. And it's easy to see why that's problematic, because read-only > PTEs that are dirty would be identified as shadow stack PTEs, which > we > want to work around. > > Again, just my 2 cents. I'm not an x86 maintainer ;) Right, I see the point. Let's see if they have any opinion. There is a bit of a historical reason for the focus on COW. As you well know the dirty bit used to be important for that case. But I think it's still not a terrible example. It covers some typical cases, but yes we don't want to mislead the reader that it is a Cow only scenario.