On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 03:01:30AM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> a shared memory "object".  To quote the rationale from P1003.1-2001:
> 
>      On implementations where memory objects are implemented using the
>      existing file system, the shm_open() function may be implemented
>      using a macro that invokes open(), and the shm_unlink() function
>      may be implemented using a macro that invokes unlink().
> 
> There had to have been some pretty strange politics going on to have
> forced the creation of the POSIX shared memory objects API even when the
> old POSIX mmap() was already a well known option!

Umm, posix SHM _does_ use mmap.  It just uses shm_open to get a suitable
fd, on Solaris and Linus that would be on tmpfs.