Figure: Three Level Page Tables
Linux assumes that there are three levels of page tables.
Each Page Table accessed contains the PFN of the next level of Page Table.
Figure 
shows how a virtual address can
be broken into a number of fields; each field providing an offset into a
particular Page Table.
To translate a virtual address into a physical one, the CPU must take the
contents of each level field, convert it into an offset into the physical
page containing the Page Table and read the PFN of the next level of Page
Table.
This is repeated three times until the PFN of the physical page containing
the virtual address is found.
Now the final field in the virtual address, the byte offset, is used to
find the data inside the page.
Each platform that Linux runs on must provide translation macros that allow the kernel to traverse the page tables for a particular process. This way, the kernel does not need to know the format of a the entries or how they are arranged.