General: Understanding Memory - Page Fault Resolution
0 Comments Published by Hs on Sunday, May 6, 2007 at 1:01 PM.
When a program execution thread attempts to reference an address on a page that is not currently resident in real memory, a hardware interrupt occurs that halts the executing program. An OS interrupt service routine (ISR) gains control following the interrupt and determines that the address referenced is valid, but is not currently resident. (If a program accesses an invalid memory location due to a logic error, e.g. referencing an un-initialized pointer, a similar hardware error occurs. It is up to the ISR to distinguish between the two conditions.) The OS then must remedy the situation by locating a copy of the desired page on a secondary storage, using an I/O operation to the paging file, and copying the designated page from disk into a free page in RAM. Once the page has been copied successfully, the OS re-dispatches the temporarily halted program, allowing the program thread to continue its normal execution cycle.
The above was extracted from the book, Windows 2000 Performance Guide by Mark Friedman & Odysseas Pentakalos.
Related Topics
Page Fault Resolution (Illustration)
Performance Concerns
Virtual Memory Shortage Alerts
Available Bytes
LRU
System Working Set
Detecting Memory Leaks
Measuring Memory Utilization
Labels: address, fault, interrupt, ISR, memory, OS, page, paging, RAM, resolution, routine, service, thread, virtual, virtual memory, Windows
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