I’ve spent quite a lot of time messing with x86_64 page tables, understanding address translation is not easy and when I started learning about it I felt like a lot of the material out there on how it works was hard for me to wrap my head around. So in this blog post I am going to attempt to provide a kind of “what I wish I had when learning about paging”. Quick note, I’ll only be discussing paging in the context of PML4 (Page Map Level 4) since it’s currently the dominant x86_64 paging scheme a...