A overview of binaries, ELF, and NoMMU on Linux

That&#x27;s a <i>lot</i> of information in a single email! Really nice, especially the history, virtual memory and nommu stuff. I recently implemented an ELF I&#x2F;O library and was forced to learn a not insignificant fraction of all that from the specification and scattered resources... An email like this would have made things so much easier.

&gt; Some old processors had page fault handling in hardware. This sucked rocks, and Linus yelled at the PowerPC guys somewhat extensively about this 20 years ago.<p>Wait, wasn&#x27;t it the other way around? I might be mistaken but wasn&#x27;t one of the problems with PowerPC that it only really had a TLB and the kernel had to walk the page tables in software?<p>Afaik on x86 the page fault handler is only called when a page isn&#x27;t marked present, so that one can allocate a new page&#x2F;load the page from mass storage, but apart from that walking the page tables is done in hardware.<p>Has been a while since I&#x27;ve only really dabbled in 32-bit protected mode a decade or so ago so I might be misremembering.