The pci tracking uses vm_page_prot to pass on the protection type from parent to child during fork. a) Parent does a pci mmap b) We look at PAT and get either UC_MINUS or WC mapping for parent c) Store that mapping type in vma vm_page_prot for future use d) This thread does a fork e) Fork results in mmap_ops ->open for the child process f) We get the vm_page_prot from vma and reserve that type for the child process But, between c) and e) above, the vma vm_page_prot is getting reset to zero. This results in PAT reserve failing at the time of fork as in here. http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=123858163103240&w=2 This cleanup makes the above problem go away as we do not depend on vm_page_prot in our PAT code anymore. Signed-off-by: Suresh Siddha Signed-off-by: Venkatesh Pallipadi Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds 8MLex