There is an unfortunate side effect of large pages. Each page (whether huge, large, or small) must be mapped with a single protection that applies to the entire page. This is because hardware memory protection is on a per-page basis. If a large page contains, for example, both read-only code and read/write data, the page must be marked as read/write, meaning that the code will be writable. As a result, device drivers or other kernel-mode code could, either maliciously or due to a bug, modify what is supposed to be read-only operating system or driver code without causing a memory access violation.
