[SkiFire13]

At least Linux does this, and it is not a security hole because it only reuses pages with memory of the current process (as in the worst case you end up reading data from some other part of your program, but not other programs).

And yes, it does happen in practice, most famously it has been mentioned in the "The strange details of std::string at Facebook" talk at CppCon 2016 https://youtu.be/kPR8h4-qZdk?t=1150&si=2R358wniZfxTJLmc

[o11c]

After watching, that has to be a kernel bug, since the documentation says "accesses" will cause repopulation, not "writes".

Edit: nevermind, I mixed up MADV_DONTNEED with MADV_FREE