Virtual Memory & Paging

By the end, you can

• Explain why two processes can use the same virtual address without conflict.
• Convert a virtual address into its page number and byte offset given a page size.
• Trace a virtual-to-physical translation through a page table.
• Describe what each PTE status bit (valid, dirty, reference, protection) records and when it matters.
• Explain how the TLB speeds up translation and why locality makes it effective.
• List the four steps the OS performs to handle a page fault under demand paging.
• Distinguish a normal page fault from a fatal segmentation fault.
• Trace the clock page-replacement algorithm to identify which frame gets evicted.
• Explain how shared libraries and copy-on-write fork exploit page-table sharing.
• Identify that all pointers in user programs are virtual addresses translated by the MMU.