- the idea is to use slot-0 in each extent for administrative metadata
- to that end, a specialised GATE-Activity is placed into slot-0
- decision to use the next-pointer for managing the next free slot
- thus we need the help of the underlying ExtentFamily for navigating Extents
Decision to refrain from any attempt to "fix" excessive memory usage,
caused by Epochs still blocked by pending IO operations. Rather, we
assume the engine uses sane parametrisation (possibly with dynamic adjustment)
Yet still there will be some safety limit, but when exceeding this limit,
the allocator will just throw, thereby killing the playback/render process