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by aslatter 1166 days ago
From my fopen(2) docs:

m (since glibc 2.3)

Attempt to access the file using mmap(2), rather than I/O system calls (read(2), write(2)). Currently, use of mmap(2) is attempted only for a file opened for reading.

1 comments

I'm very skeptical that this actually makes things faster. For one, zstd is definitely going to be CPU bound rather than I/O bound. But even if it wasn't, there shouldn't be a performance benefit to reading a file sequentially using mmap compared to reading it sequentially using read, which you can easily verify yourself by writing a small program that just reads files both ways.
I think for clear linux, it might be for memory saving in constraint devices rather than for speed optimization.