Fault simply means that the TLB has a cache miss and then traps to the OS to handle the miss. &quot;Fault&quot; is a concept of what is happening a &quot;trap&quot; is what happens.<p>Edit:<p>x86 does have a register for defining the location of page tables that it will walk, the it would trap on a miss if the PTE is missing. Idk, if Linux uses this register or not or uses a software defined TLB, or some kind of hybrid approach.