Page Faults, Memory Locking, and Huge Pages
An address can be valid without its page being immediately usable. Fault handling, page population, locking, and page size change latency and translation cost.
Planned model
Touch pages in an allocated region and distinguish minor faults, major faults, zero-fill, copy-on-write, locked memory, and huge-page translation coverage.
Questions
- Why does reserving memory not guarantee that every page is resident?
- What does prefaulting accomplish?
- Which tradeoffs accompany huge pages and memory locking?
Exercise
Prepare a fixed working set before a critical loop and describe what residual page-related delays can still occur.