Re: Crash report #1 with SADISTIC_KMALLOC/no modules

Mike Castle (mcastle@umr.edu)
Mon, 8 Apr 1996 13:28:33 -0500 (CDT)

Amazingly enough Linus Torvalds said:
> Not possible, unless the chip in question does other things wrong. The
> %cr2 register contains the virtual faulting address, and all the page
> table lookups on a x86 are physical (and thus the page table lookups can
> never fault, like on some other architectures).

Does this mean that you cannot page out page tables at all, or
it's just a design issue not to? Can the page tables fill up
physical memory? Does this also limit the amount of memory in
use to some function of physical memory?

I seem to remember that the go32 DOS extender used with DJGPP
v1.x allowed the page tables the be paged out. I'm wondering if
this is just a slightly different use of terminology here.

I assume the amount of memory taken up by page tables is
negligible compared to the pages they represent.

mrc

-- 
Mike Castle .-=NEXUS=-.  Life is like a clock:  You can work constantly
  mcastle@cs.umr.edu     and be right all the time, or not work at all
   mcastle@umr.edu       and be right at least twice a day.  -- mrc
    We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan.  -- Watchmen