Change a PAGE_READONLY mapping to a PAGE_WRITECOPY one. The commit charge is billed at VirtualProtect time, and the protection can fail if you run out of commit

Change a PAGE_READONLY mapping to a PAGE_WRITECOPY one. The commit charge is billed at VirtualProtect time, and the protection can fail if you run out of commit. The kernel doesn't have to commit anything for a PAGE_READONLY mapping because all pages in such a mapping are guaranteed to be clean and trivially evictable. Not so once you introduce the possibility of COW faults. Reserving a big range of address space and committing it a little bit at a time is a very common pattern. Another thing: create a 1GB section. Map it, and fill it up. Unmap it. Map it again. What you wrote is still there. Between the map and remap, you have commit without corresponding address space.