Part 1: How to translate address
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a RISC-V page table is logically an array of 2^27 (134,217,728) page table entries (PTEs). The paging hardware translates a virtual address by using the top 27 bits of the 39 bits to index into the page table to find a PTE, and making a 56-bit physical address whose top 44 bits come from the PPN in the PTE and whose bottom 12 bits are copied from the original virtual address. Thus a page table gives the operating system control over virtual-to-physical address translations at the granularity of aligned chunks of 4096 (2^12) bytes. Such a chunk is called a page.
The total supported number of pages are: 2^27
Each size is 2^12.
GB size is 2^30.
MAXVA is actually one bit less than the max allowed by Sv39, to avoid having to sign-extend virtual addresses that have the high bit set.
#define MAXVA (1L << (9 + 9 + 9 + 12 - 1))
So the total virtual memory can support up to 2^(27+12-30 - 1) => 2^8.
The available virtual memory is 256 GB.
the actual translation happens in three steps.
kernel must write the physical address of the root page-table page into the satp register. Each CPU has its own satp.
Read: Reference: āUnderstanding the Linux Kernelā, third edition - sections ā8.1.3. Memory Zonesā and ā8.1.6. Kernel Mappings of High-Memory Page Framesā.
For 32 bit machines: Page frames above the 896 MB boundary are not generally mapped in the fourth gigabyte of the kernel linear address spaces, so the kernel is unable to directly access them.
