Page fault
A page fault is an exception or memory-access condition that occurs when a process accesses a virtual-memory page requiring operating-system handling.
Latency
A page fault is a processor-generated exception raised when an accessed virtual memory page is not currently mapped to usable physical memory.
- How it is used
- Explains lazy virtual-memory allocation, file-backed access, swapping, and the latency costs of page faults.
- How deep it goes
- Traces the hardware trap, operating-system response, file loading, swapping, and latency trade-offs, but not handler implementation.
- Examples
- Uses executable sections, a 0x200000 address example, mmap(), file-backed pages, swap, and pinned memory.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate page-fault latency and choose memory mapping, pinning, or access-pattern strategies for workload constraints.
Rust in Action: Systems programming concepts and techniques
A page fault is a memory-access condition in which the requested address is unavailable and the required data must be fetched into memory.
- How it is used
- Explains how operating systems supply unavailable virtual-memory data during ordinary program execution.
- How deep it goes
- Defines the condition and relates it to swapping and address translation, but stops short of detailing the handler’s implementation.
- Examples
- Uses missing data in RAM, disk-backed page retrieval, and a CPU terminology taxonomy as concrete illustrations.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate whether a memory-access event is a recoverable page fault or an illegal-address segmentation fault.
Read how Rust in Action: Systems programming concepts and techniques explains page fault →
Related concepts
- tail latencyproduces · Tail latency is a high-percentile measure of a response-time or operation-latency distribution that characterizes its slowest requests or operations.
- d-ary heapaddressed by · A d-ary heap is a heap-ordered tree in which each internal node has at most a fixed number d greater than one of children.
- memory allocationproduces · Memory allocation is the process of reserving or assigning storage for program data and objects during execution.
- operating systemuses · An operating system is system software that manages computer hardware and provides services and interfaces for application programs.
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