der Mouse  <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA> writes:

> A while ago, NetBSD had a bug that meant that reads and writes via
> mmap() and accessing the memory were decoupled from reads and writes
> via read() and write().

I suspect that you're slightly tongue-in-cheek here, but still: I'd
like to contend that this is _not_ a bug, just a design choice.  You
may feel that it's a bad choice, of course, but if so, I'd further
like to point out that the really bad design choice is mmap() itself,
which has so poor error handling that it forces programmers to mix
their metaphors, so to speak, and use both mmap and read/write level
I/O on the same file objects.  If mmap() and friends were specified
more completely to begin with, it would be possible to fully separate
the use of the two access methods, and there would be no problem.

-tih
-- 
Popularity is the hallmark of mediocrity.  --Niles Crane, "Frasier"