Linux Kernel Architecture

Virtual and physical addresses

Physical pages are often called page frames. In contrast, the term page is reserved for pages in virtual address space.

The figure also shows that not all pages of the virtual address spaces are linked with a page frame. This may be because either the pages are not used or because data have not been loaded into memory because they are not yet needed. It may also be that the page has been swapped out onto hard disk and will be swapped back in when needed.

Page Tables

Page cache

The kernel uses caches to improve system performance. Data read from slow block devices are held in RAM for a while, even if they are no longer needed at the time. When an application next accesses the data, they can be read from fast RAM, thus bypassing the slow block device. Because the kernel implements access to block devices by means of page memory mappings, caches are also organized into pages, that is, whole pages are cached, thus giving rise to the name page cache.

The far less important buffer cache is used to cache data that are not organized into pages. On traditional Unix systems, the buffer cache serves as the main system cache, and the same approach was used by Linux a long, long time ago. By now, the buffer cache has mostly been superseded by the page cache.