page table walker

The page table walker is a hardware or software mechanism that traverses page tables to translate virtual addresses to physical addresses. On WindowsForum.com, discussions about the page table walker often involve Linux kernel bugs, such as CVE-2025-40218, where a DAMON virtual-address page table walker could loop infinitely when encountering a PMD migration descriptor during CPU hotplug, causing a soft lockup. The fix stops retrying the walk in that path, as DAMON is best-effort and can skip inaccessible pages. While the tag primarily appears in Linux kernel contexts, it is relevant to Windows users interested in memory management, virtualization, and system stability, as page table walkers are fundamental to modern operating systems.