Hi, NAHieu wrote: > So the conclusion is: (in *vanilla kernel*) page tables are only for > userspace processes, and kernel space doesnt need page tables at all. No, once the pagination has been activated on an i386 processor, then the address of each memory access is translated into a physical address using page tables. So page tables are mandatory for all virtual addresses. However, on a conceptual point-of-view, page tables are not really needed in the 3G-4G area, since it is simply an identity-mapping of the physical memory. But since the i386 architecture *needs* page tables, then we must have them. Note that in some other architectures (MIPS, for example), page tables don't exist, there's only a huge TLB. Sincerly, Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni thomas.petazzoni@xxxxxxxx -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
