A guest operating system (OS) detects a direct memory access (DMA) write request for a device assigned to a guest OS to perform a DMA write to a page of memory and, prior to a write access of to the page, sets a DMA write state of a guest physical address for the requested page of memory to indicate that a DMA write operation is in progress for the requested page. The guest OS causes a virtual central processing unit (CPU) to attempt to write to the requested page of memory and sends the DMA write request to the device to cause the device to write to the requested page of memory.