Multi-level page table

A hierarchy of page tables indexed by successive groups of virtual page number bits. Unused regions can omit lower-level tables.

The useful omission is an entire lower-level array, not merely an invalid page table entry. One absent upper-level entry can represent a large unmapped interval of the address space. The Linux kernel's documented hierarchy uses this idea to avoid allocating tables for unused regions; its software levels can also be folded to match the hardware. ^[ref]