2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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hole
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. A region in an otherwise flat entity which is not actually present. For
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example, some Unix filesystems can store large files with holes so that
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unused regions of the file are never actually stored on disk. (In techspeak,
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these are referred to as sparse files.) As another example, the region of
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memory in IBM PCs reserved for memory-mapped I/O devices which may not
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actually be present is called the I/O hole , since memory-management systems
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must skip over this area when filling user requests for memory.
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