Briefly explain the steps involved in handling a page fault by an operating system
Answers
Answer:
The memory address requested is first checked, to make sure it was a valid memory request.
If the reference was invalid, the process is terminated. Otherwise, the page must be paged in.
A free frame is located, possibly from a free-frame list.
A disk operation is scheduled to bring in the necessary page from disk. ( This will usually block the process on an I/O wait, allowing some other process to use the CPU in the meantime. )
When the I/O operation is complete, the process’s page table is updated with the new frame number, and the invalid bit is changed to indicate that this is now a valid page reference.
The instruction that caused the page fault must now be restarted from the beginning, ( as soon as this process gets another turn on the CPU. )