Page Fault Handling

Earlier, you saw how address translations are resolved when the PTE is valid. When the PTE valid bit is clear, this indicates that the desired page is for some reason not currently accessible to the process. This section describes the types of invalid PTEs and how references to them are resolved.

Note

Only the 32-bit x86 PTE formats are detailed in this section. PTEs for 64-bit systems contain similar information, but their detailed layout is not presented.

A reference to an invalid page is called a page fault. The kernel trap handler (introduced in the section “Trap Dispatching” in Chapter 3 in Part 1) dispatches this kind of fault to the memory manager fault handler (MmAccessFault) to resolve. This routine runs in the context ...

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