Wednesday, 24 July 2013

Exactly Why Are Page Faults Illegal At IRQL Level 2?

You may notice with Stop 0xA, Stop 0xD1 and Stop 0xC5, there always seems to be a illegal page fault or some other illegal instruction, although, page faults seem to be the most common.

To answer the question in the title, the answer is the the scheduler is turned off, therefore only non-paged pool can be accessed, since accessing memory which isn't available would lead to a page fault, which would then result in the thread being placed in a wait state with a context switch to a different thread being used, whilst the thread waited for the Memory Manager to process the page fault and make the memory address available. By changing to the contexts of different threads, then important data structures which are being synchronized at IRQL Level 2, would then need to be resynchronized.

Example - http://www.sevenforums.com/bsod-help-support/297605-bsod-when-playing-anything-0x000000d1-3.html#post2468537

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