How exactly are page tables allocated on demand for large reserved regions?

Raymond Chen July 1, 2016 Jul 1, 2016 07/1/16

Commenter pm100 asked to go into more detail into why reserving a large amount of address space used to be expensive, and now it's not. I sort of answered it in my reply, but let's draw some pictures. Recall that the paging structure is hierarchical. To describe a page of memory, you first select a page directory pointer from the page ...