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.