also sprach Anthony DeRobertis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002.09.26.1322 +0200]: > > i am repeatedly seeing the term "page fault" being used in Debian in > > the wrong way. > > (examples?)
libsigsegv-dev's description various posts to the debian-* lists > It has quite a bit to do with an invalid access. As far as the MMU is > concerned, it *is* an invalid access: There is no page mapped to the > address, and thus it throws a (hardware) exception called a 'page > fault'. Right. I was trying not to go into too much detail. A fault is an exception, something that's not expected. These days, page faults are rather expected to happen. > > A page fault simply occurs > > when a memory access causes the memory management system to have to > > fetch the requested page from swap. > > Not quite. Page faults can be satisfied from things besides disk as > well. Example: bringing in part of an ELF fragment from the page cache. > Example: first write to newly allocated (in the kernel's view) memory. > Example: High-mem support. Okay, okay. > Even things like copy-on-write pages (from, e.g., fork) generate > something that might be called a page fault on the first write attempt. > So does an attempt to write to null. Alright, I have simplified it too much. -- martin; (greetings from the heart of the sun.) \____ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck "all unser übel kommt daher, daß wir nicht allein sein können." -- schopenhauer
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