Page fault

In computing, a page fault (sometimes called PF or hard fault) is an exception that the memory management unit (MMU) raises when a process accesses a memory page without proper preparations. Accessing the page requires a mapping to be added to the process's virtual address space. Besides, the actual page contents may need to be loaded from a backing store, such as a disk. The MMU detects the page fault, but the operating system's kernel handles the exception by making the required page accessible in the physical memory or denying an illegal memory access. Valid page faults are common and necessary to increase the amount of memory available to programs in any operating system that uses virtual memory, such as Windows, macOS, and the Linux kernel. If the page is loaded in memory at the time the fault is generated, but is not marked in the memory management unit as being loaded in memory, then it is called a minor or soft page fault. The page fault handler in the operating system merely needs to make the entry for that page in the memory management unit point to the page in memory and indicate that the page is loaded in memory; it does not need to read the page into memory. This could happen if the memory is shared by different programs and the page is already brought into memory for other programs. The page could also have been removed from the working set of a process, but not yet written to disk or erased, such as in operating systems that use Secondary Page Caching. For example, HP OpenVMS may remove a page that does not need to be written to disk (if it has remained unchanged since it was last read from disk, for example) and place it on a Free Page List if the working set is deemed too large. However, the page contents are not overwritten until the page is assigned elsewhere, meaning it is still available if it is referenced by the original process before being allocated. Since these faults do not involve disk latency, they are faster and less expensive than major page faults.