a method for translating a virtual address into a physical address , in which page tables used in the translation process are referenced by virtual addresses . typically , a translation mechanism includes a translation buffer that , given a virtual address , can sometimes provide the corresponding physical address . a translation - buffer miss is said to occur when the translation buffer is presented with an address for which it can not provide the translation . when such a miss occurs , the translation mechanism obtains the translation by reading the page tables . when the translation mechanism attempts to read the page tables from virtual memory , a second - order miss can occur . the difficulty of infinite recursion of misses is avoided by handling second - order misses differently from first - order misses . when a second - order miss occurs , the translation mechanism uses a prototype page table entry and the virtual address of the page table entry to produce a physical address without using the page tables . since consecutive pages of the page table in virtual memory reside in consecutive page frames in physical memory , a virtual address in the page tables can be translated to a physical address by adding the page frame number from the prototype page table entry to the virtual page number in the virtual address . the prototype page table entry contains a page - frame number that is equal to the page - frame number of the first page of the page table minus the virtual - page number of the first page of the page table .