US Patent Issued to Dell Products on Sept. 15 for "Managing reference counts of virtual blocks" (Israeli Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 15 -- United States Patent no. 12,737,291, issued on Sept. 15, was assigned to Dell Products LP (Round Rock, Texas).

"Managing reference counts of virtual blocks" was invented by Vladimir Shveidel (Pardes Hana-Karkur, Israel) and Uri Shabi (Tel Mond, Israel).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A technique of managing reference counts of virtual blocks includes providing a virtual block having a fixed-length reference-count field configured to store a reference count, the reference count indicating a number of pointers that point to the virtual block. The technique further includes creating an incref (reference-count increment) directed to the virtual block and, in response to...