On Thursday, February 12, 2026, at 9:08 AM, hiro wrote: > you're saying you want the software to be more simple, but at the same time > you say you want to exploit some techniques that make the hardware use more > efficient. > the first goal is commendable, but for the second you have to first > understand how the hardware actually works. i suggest you share the insight > that makes you believe mmap is "more efficient" than reading a large file. I don't think it is, and I don't think I ever said it was more efficient, did I? I think having the whole file in your address space makes it easier to select the bits of the file you want to read - assuming you don't need to read all or even most of it. Being that selective probably only makes a significant speed difference when the file is large, anyway.
I've built a couple of simple disk file systems. I thinking of taking the cache code out of one of them and mapping the whole file system image into the address space - to see how much it simplifies the code. I'm not expecting it will be faster. On Thursday, February 12, 2026, at 12:38 PM, hiro wrote: > If you poke at it sparsely then reading it into memory is what you should > avoid, thus you use seek and normal read instead. that is more simple, > efficient, optimal. I'm sure that's been argued to death over the years. But in a lot of situations I'd agree with you. It's going to be a tradeoff. My interest is in simpler software - so I'm exploring a way get some of the effect of mmap without having actual mmap - by making it an implementation detail. ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Te8d7c6e48b5c075b-Mdbd5febf25c74da357aee4b1 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
