no, i meant that on a page fault, fault.c just does much the same read from the file that the system call would do, except it's more complicated to get there. ask = s->flen-soff; if(ask > BY2PG) ask = BY2PG; n = devtab[c->type]->read(c, kaddr, ask, daddr); if(n != ask) faulterror(Eioload, c, 0); (and that's also true on SunOS, Solaris, and probably Linux, except that on some it is really very complicated, not just more complicated than read.) the thing that saves it is the Image cache off to the side.