A particular case of memory sharing is mishandled in the virtual memory system. It is possible and legal to establish a relationship where multiple descendant processes share a mapping which shadows memory of an ancestor process. In this scenario, when one process modifies memory through such a mapping, the copy-on-write logic fails to invalidate other mappings of the source page. These stale mappings may remain even after the mapped pages have been reused for another purpose. Obtained from: FreeBSD