Re: Big mallocs, mmap sorrows and double buffering.
Snow Cat (snowcat@netgate.net)
Wed, 12 Feb 1997 09:48:36 -0800 (PST)
Matti Aarnio once wrote:
>
> It depends -- if the file page is pre-allocated, you can
> write to it via MAP_SHARED, but you can't extend a file
> just by overmapping a memory region, and then storeing
> into those non-backed pages. That is where you will
> always need write().
>
> I recall the `ofd' was opened with O_TRUNC flag, which means
> it had zero size...
>
> In many systems attempt to mmap() [PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED] on
> a file with holes in it (or beyond its end) produces an error.
> Here we are treading on extremely varying area of system
> implementations.
>
Well, at least under Linux and SunOS mmap()ing a file with a hole looks Ok.
I usually ftruncate() a file to 2G, do all the mmap()ed I/O I need and then
ftruncate() it back to an original size. Does anyone know a good reason not
to support an mmap beyond the end of file?
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