[dekhn]

although it's true that many hardware problems exhibit as SIGBUS on memmapped memory, remember that this is an API and implementation written for high performance disk drives on important servers; for example, the ingres server on berkeley's research vax (IIRC mmap became used widely after one of the BSD 4.3 subreleases was released). IE, at the time, the idea of a drive that could be easily detached being used for production computing would have been crazy so I think crashing the app when a drive is removed is not completely insensible.

[loeg]

The fault will also raise a signal if there is an error reading the sector from the drive (what would be an EIO from read()). Lack of error handling in mmap isn't only a problem for removable media.

[dekhn]

yes, that sounds like a good idea to me. Like I said: if you use mmap, the expectation is that the drive will not bork and if it does, it should terminate the application.

[Dwedit]

In addition to a drive being removed, it also happens for a network share over wifi when the connection is temporarily lost.