[linux-audio-dev] memory-mapped wav files

[Paul Davis]

On Fri, 2006-07-14 at 00:56 +0400, Dmitry Baikov wrote:
> If you need to stream a file, mmap'ed variant will eat memory up to
> file size. Given large enough file, it will eat all you memory and
> then will begin to page out unused portions of the file.
> Of course, details on when and where will vary depending on VM-system
> implementation.
> 
> The thing is, you really need only a small portion of a file. Memory
> mapping is useful if you need all data to be (virtually) present in
> RAM.

moreover, in 2001-2002, it was actually slower to do i/o  this way. when
asked about linus said "i know and i intend to keep it that
way" (paraphrasing).

--p