9.4. Page Fault Exception Handler

As stated previously, the Linux Page Fault exception handler must distinguish exceptions caused by programming errors from those caused by a reference to a page that legitimately belongs to the process address space but simply hasn't been allocated yet.

The memory region descriptors allow the exception handler to perform its job quite efficiently. The do_page_fault( ) function, which is the Page Fault interrupt service routine for the 80 × 86 architecture, compares the linear address that caused the Page Fault against the memory regions of the current process; it can thus determine the proper way to handle the exception according to the scheme that is illustrated in Figure 9-4.