What is the purpose of paging the page tables?

Answer 1

The purpose of paging the page tables is to allow a computer's operating system to efficiently manage memory by dividing it into smaller, fixed-sized units called pages. Paging enables the computer to allocate memory more flexibly and efficiently than using a contiguous block of memory for every process.

Page tables are used to map virtual memory addresses to physical memory addresses. When a program accesses a memory location, the virtual memory address is looked up in the page table to determine its corresponding physical memory address. Paging the page tables allows the computer to keep only the necessary parts of the page table in physical memory at any given time. This is important because page tables can be quite large, and keeping the entire table in physical memory would be wasteful of resources.

When a process needs to access a memory location that is not in physical memory, the page table entry for that location indicates that a page fault has occurred. The operating system can then load the necessary page into physical memory from disk, updating the page table accordingly.

Overall, paging the page tables allows the operating system to make efficient use of memory by allocating it as needed and only keeping necessary portions of the page table in physical memory.

Answer 2

In certain situations the page tables could become large enough that by paging the page

tables, one could simplify the memory allocation problem (by ensuring that everything

is allocated as fixed-size pages as opposed to variable-sized chunks) and also enable the

swapping of portions of page table that are not currently used.

The disadvantage that associate with it is that more memory accesses may be required for address translation.