Broadly speaking, I am wondering how the kernel (or the CPU) knows that a process has tried to access a memory location for which it lacks permission, and how the mysterious piece of hardware called MMU helps in doing that.

In particular: It seems to me that the MMU is agnostic towards the memory management model of the OS kernel (paging, memory zones, process adress spaces...) (I would presume that Linux and Windows pages are not exactly the same, for example. Correct me if I'm wrong). But then, how does my CPU find out whether the current code may access location x? And how does it signal this to the kernel?

c memory-management linux-kernel hardware
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