Meltdown strikes back: the L1 terminal fault vulnerability

Posted Aug 28, 2018 20:16 UTC (Tue) by loch (guest, #113644)
Parent article: Meltdown strikes back: the L1 terminal fault vulnerability

"...for pages that have been swapped out, the location in the swap area is stored in the PTE. In other cases, the data left in non-present PTEs is essentially random."

I'm a bit confused, what are the other cases? In what situation would a page be non-present, but also not in swap?

Non-present, not in swap

Posted Aug 28, 2018 21:10 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

File-backed pages are the most common example of pages that can be non-present but not in swap.