> Some old processors had page fault handling in hardware. This sucked rocks, and
Linus yelled at the PowerPC guys somewhat extensively about this 20 years ago.
Wait, wasn't it the other way around? I might be mistaken but wasn't one of the problems with PowerPC that it only really had a TLB and the kernel had to walk the page tables in software?
Afaik on x86 the page fault handler is only called when a page isn't marked present, so that one can allocate a new page/load the page from mass storage, but apart from that walking the page tables is done in hardware.
Has been a while since I've only really dabbled in 32-bit protected mode a decade or so ago so I might be misremembering.
Wait, wasn't it the other way around? I might be mistaken but wasn't one of the problems with PowerPC that it only really had a TLB and the kernel had to walk the page tables in software?
Afaik on x86 the page fault handler is only called when a page isn't marked present, so that one can allocate a new page/load the page from mass storage, but apart from that walking the page tables is done in hardware.
Has been a while since I've only really dabbled in 32-bit protected mode a decade or so ago so I might be misremembering.