VMA of processes and CPU registers

[mindentropy]

On Wednesday 20 Apr 2011 4:31:08 pm limp wrote:
> Thanks a lot Dace and Vladimir for your replies.
> 
> First of all, I forgot to mention that I am talking for x86 architecture.
> 
> > The CPU registers will contain the virtual addresses. Each and every
> > time that the CPU tries to access a virtual memory location, then the
> > address will be translated by the MMU into a physical address.
> 
> So, AFAIU the translation to physical memory takes place *only* when the
> ALU of the processor has to do some operation which has memory operands
> (in this case the CPU needs to deal with the *real* addresses) but not
> prior to that.
> 

The address translation happens in the following way:

Logical Addr-->|Segmentation Unit|-->Linear Addr -->|Paging unit|--> Physical 
Addr.

If the paging unit is not setup then the linear addr is the physical addr.