Where Are Page Tables Stored?
Understand why page tables occupy significant memory in operating systems and how they are stored in physical memory. Explore the impact of address space size on page table storage and the importance of this data structure for virtual-to-physical address translation.
We'll cover the following...
We'll cover the following...
Page tables require large memory
Page tables can get terribly large, much bigger than the small segment table or base/bounds pair we have discussed previously. For example, imagine a typical 32-bit address space, with 4KB pages. This virtual address splits into a 20-bit VPN and 12-bit offset (recall that 10 bits would be needed for a 1KB page size, and just add two more to get to 4KB).
A 20-bit VPN implies that there are ...