memory hole

Noun

memory hole (plural memory holes)

1. A figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up; nowhere, oblivion.
   • As relations between the West and Russia grew worse, the party began to discard its patriotic draperies; everything that had been said during the war years was now quietly dropped into the memory hole.1957, Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, with the assistance of Julius Jacobson, “The Cold War: Repression and Collapse”, in The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957), Boston, Mass.: Beacon...
   • President [Richard] Nixon didn't even blush when he claimed that the raise in the debt limit was "in the interest of responsible management." If it were already 1984, all of Nixon's old speeches about the government squandering our money could be shoved into the "memory hole."1969 July 2, John R[ichard] Rarick, “Challenge to America, 1969”, in Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 91st Congress, First Session (United States House of Representatives), volume...

   Synonyms:

   bit bucket, /dev/null

2. A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory.
   • A memory hole provides performance improvement by reserving certain parts of memory for use by ISA cards. […] The memory hole is usually disabled because there are few ISA cards today that need to be mapped. If you have an ISA card that refuses to function properly in a PC with more than 16MB of...1997, Stephen J. Bigelow, “System Questions”, in PC Hardware FAT FAQs: Troubleshooting, Upgrading, Maintaining, and Repairing, New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, →ISBN, pages 11–12
   • We won't touch high ISA memory (the so-called memory hole in the 14 MB to 16 MB physical address range), because that kind of I/O memory is extremely rare nowadays and is not supported by the majority of modern motherboards or by the kernel.2001 June, Alessandro Rubini, Jonathan Corbet, “Hardware Management”, in Andy Oram, editor, Linux Device Drivers, 2nd edition, Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly & Associates, →ISBN, page 245
3. (rare) Synonym of memory leak (“any of several faults in the memory allocation logic of a computer or program whereby parts of memory become hidden or unusable”).
   • The use of new and delete, along with the scope related creation and deletion of objects, provide safer and more consistent management of the available memory pool. […] It also resolves common problems with passing incorrect pointers to free, or obtaining memory using malloc and then forgetting to...1992 September 9, Andrew McRae, “C++ in an Embedded Environment”, in AUUG 1992 Conference & Exhibition: Maintaining Control in an Open World: World Congress Centre, Melbourne, Australia, 8–11...
   • When Lighttpd finishes, it calls mod_helloworld_free to release the memory held by plugin_data. Beware that not freeing the plugin_data creates a memory hole.2008, Andre Bogus, “Writing Lighttpd Modules”, in Lighttpd: Installing, Compiling, Configuring, Optimizing, and Securing this Lighting-fast Web Server, Birmingham, West Midlands: Packt Publishing...

   Synonyms:

   memory leak