On Wed, Mar 02, 2022 at 09:38:09PM +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote: > (a) I want a R/O pin to observe file modifications. > (b) I want the R/O pin to *not* observe file modifications but observe > my (eventual? if any) private modifications, A scenario I know that motivated this is fairly straightfoward: static char data[] = {}; ibv_reg_mr(data, READ_ONLY) data[0] = 1 .. go touch data via DMA .. We want to reliably observe the '1' What is happening under the covers is that 'data' is placed in the .data segment and becomes a file backed MAP_PRIVATE page. The write COWs that page It would work OK if it was in .bss instead I think the FOLL_FORCE is there because otherwise the trick doesn't work on true RO pages and the API becomes broken. Jason