Paging is still enabled in kernel mode, the kernel uses virtual addresses. (The kernel's linear mapping of physical memory can take advantage of huge pages tho

Paging is still enabled in kernel mode, the kernel uses virtual addresses. (The kernel's linear mapping of physical memory can take advantage of huge pages though, which means that there might be one or two less levels of page tables involved with those addresses). TLB misses aren't significant if you're bulk-writing to a block of memory anyway, you'll max out the bandwidth of the memory without that being an issue.