Processing Page Faults

When a process attempts to access a page, for which the present bit in the PTE is not set, a page fault occurs. The page fault is passed to OS/2 Version 2.0's page fault handler, and the following sequence of events takes place:

  • A PF is allocated from the free list or the LRU end of the idle list. Should the PF be taken from the idle list, and its current contents be marked as "dirty ", it will be necessary to first write the page to the swap file.

  • Once the PF is available, its contents will be loaded based on information contained in the VP. The source could be one of the following: