ITPEC FE Morning October 2023 Question 17
ITPEC FE Morning October 2023 — Question 17 of 80
Page Fault — occurs when a program accesses a valid virtual page not currently in main memory.
The OS uses paging: virtual address space is divided into pages. When a page is valid but not loaded into RAM, the CPU raises a page fault. The OS then loads the page from disk and resumes execution.
Why not others:
- (a) Fatal error — unrecoverable failure; page fault is a normal, handled event
- (c) Scheduling error — relates to process scheduling, not memory access
- (d) Segmentation fault — accessing memory outside the valid address space (illegal access)
Key distinction:
- Page fault = valid page, not in RAM → OS loads it
- Segmentation fault = invalid/forbidden memory access → process terminated
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