Page Tables

Page Tables

From The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser by Hussein Nasser

December 15, 2025 · 47 min

About this episode

This episode explores the inner workings of page tables and their role in mapping virtual memory to physical memory.

Page tables provide the mapping between virtual memory and physical memory for each process. This means it needs to be as efficient and as fast as possible. I explore the inner workings of page tables in this episode. 0:00 Intro 2:00 Virtual Memory ⁃ ⁃ 8:00 MMU 10:00 Page Tables ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ 11:30 Single Table Byte Addressability ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ 16:00 Single Table Page addressability ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ 19:00 Multi-level Paging (Radix tree) ⁃ ⁃ 31:00 Huge Tables ⁃ ⁃ 33:00 TLB ⁃ ⁃ Summary

People in this episode

Host: Hussein Nasser

Topics covered

  • Page Tables
  • Virtual Memory
  • MMU
  • Multi-level Paging
  • TLB
  • Memory Management

Keywords

  • Page Tables
  • Virtual Memory
  • MMU
  • Multi-level Paging
  • TLB
  • Memory Management Unit

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MMU, TLB, Radix tree

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