What are page tables?

Key Takeaways

you know, the kernel, there is the your user process. In a sense, it's asking for a uh for something. And then there is the CPU. And there is there should be a dance between these three three to get things right. Page tables provide the mappings between virtual addresses to physical addresses in physical memory. Because of that, you can just imagine how hot and how frequent is this translation is. So, that really means that you really need to build a fast translator. And only just fast and a But but you really need to make it efficient because whatever we're adding here is an overhead. Page tables are an overhead that is not really part They take some of the physical memory from us, users. So, if you're the kernel design, you need to really design it in a way that that it does not suck in. So, in this episode of the Back End Engineering Show, I will I want to talk about the inner workings of page tables. Why do we need this? You see, physical memory, which is the RAM, when you insert these slots, you get X amount of gigabytes. All for you, the user, which you spin up a bunch of processes. If these processes all have access directly to the physical memory, things can go wrong. There are a lot of challenges cuz these processes will eventually step on each other's toes. If I write something as process A, what makes process B not accidentally override the stuff I wrote in the same addresses? Right? Because it's a shared space. It's like It's like literally shared memory between all those processes.