What Is A Page Fault?
OSR Staff | Published: 06-May-03| Modified: 07-May-03 One of the amazing ideas we often use in developing computer software is to add “levels of indirection” to the processing. While we all know this doesn’t improve their performance it often allows us to make changes without interfering with other software components that are using our resources. Virtual Memory is a rather old idea, being first described in an academic paper in 1959. Since that time it has been rediscovered numerous times by various operating systems groups as they tried to find ways to avoid issues related to the amount of physical memory present in the system. To do this, Windows divides up all the physical memory in the system into a series of pages (on the x86 architecture this is normally 4KB but driver writers should use the manifest constant PAGE_SIZE). It also divides up the virtual address space into a series of comparably sized pages as well. Finally, Windows and the underlying hardware platform agree upon a
