Linux Page Table Management

This chapter will begin by describing how the page table is arranged and what types are used to describe the three separate levels of the page table. Next is how a virtual address is broken up into its component parts for navigating the table. After this is covered, I discuss the lowest level entry, the PTE, and what bits are used by the hardware. After that, the macros used for navigating a page table and setting and checking attributes will be discussed before talking about how the page table is populated and how pages are allocated and freed for the use with page tables. The initialization stage is then discussed, which shows how the page tables are initialized during boot strapping. Finally, I cover how the TLB and CPU caches are utilized.