page fault

page fault

A virtual memory interrupt that signals that the next instruction or item of data is not in physical memory and must be swapped back in from the disk. If the required page on disk cannot be found, then a page fault error occurs, which means that either the operating system or an application has corrupted the virtual memory. If such an error occurs, the user has to reload the application.

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page fault [′pāj ‚fȯlt]

(computer science)

An interruption that occurs while a page which is referred to by the program is being read into memory.

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(memory management)

page fault - In a paged virtual memory system, an access to a page (block) of memory that is not currently mapped to physical memory. When a page fault occurs the operating system either fetches the page in from secondary storage (usually disk) if the access was legitimate or otherwise reports the access as illegal.