Reasons for page fault Hardware generates a page fault for page accesses where:
the page corresponding to the requested address is not loaded in memory. the page corresponding to the memory address accessed is loaded, but its present status is not updated in hardware. The closely related exception known as the protection fault is generated for page accesses where:
the page is not part of the program, and so is not mapped in program memory. the program does not have sufficient privileges to read or write the page. the page access is legal, but it is mapped with demand paging.
