Page fault

From Computer History Wiki
Revision as of 19:03, 18 December 2018 by Jnc (talk | contribs) (+cat)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search

A page fault is an event in a virtual memory system when the CPU makes a reference to a page in the current process' address space which is not 'resident' - i.e. it is currently on secondary storage, not in main memory.

When this happens, a trap results; before the faulting instruction can be re-started, the page has to be brought into main memory.