mmap, msync and linux process termination

I want to use mmap to implement persistence of certain portions of program state in a C program running under Linux by associating a fixed-size struct with a well known file name using mmap() with the MAP_SHARED flag set. For performance reasons, I would prefer not to call msync() at all, and no other programs will be accessing this file. When my program terminates and is restarted, it will map the same file again and do some processing on it to recover the state that it was in before the termination. My question is this: if I never call msync() on the file descriptor, will the kernel guarantee that all updates to the memory will get written to disk and be subsequently recoverable even if my process is terminated with SIGKILL? Also, will there be general system overhead from the kernel periodically writing the pages to disk even if my program never calls msync()?

EDIT: I've settled the problem of whether the data is written, but I'm still not sure about whether this will cause some unexpected system loading over trying to handle this problem with open()/write()/fsync() and taking the risk that some data might be lost if the process gets hit by KILL/SEGV/ABRT/etc. Added a 'linux-kernel' tag in hopes that some knowledgeable person might chime in.

c linux linux-kernel

Edit Report

I decided to be less lazy and answer the question of whether the data is written to disk definitively by writing some code. The answer is that it will be written.

Here is a program that kills itself abruptly after writing some data to an mmap'd file:

#include <stdint.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

typedef struct {
  char data[100];
  uint16_t count;
} state_data;

const char *test_data = "test";

int main(int argc, const char *argv[]) {
  int fd = open("test.mm", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, (mode_t)0700);
  if (fd < 0) {
    perror("Unable to open file 'test.mm'");
    exit(1);
  }
  size_t data_length = sizeof(state_data);
  if (ftruncate(fd, data_length) < 0) {
    perror("Unable to truncate file 'test.mm'");
    exit(1);
  }
  state_data *data = (state_data *)mmap(NULL, data_length, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED|MAP_POPULATE, fd, 0);
  if (MAP_FAILED == data) {
    perror("Unable to mmap file 'test.mm'");
    close(fd);
    exit(1);
  }
  memset(data, 0, data_length);
  for (data->count = 0; data->count < 5; ++data->count) {
    data->data[data->count] = test_data[data->count];
  }
  kill(getpid(), 9);
}

Here is a program that validates the resulting file after the previous program is dead:

#include <stdint.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <assert.h>

typedef struct {
  char data[100];
  uint16_t count;
} state_data;

const char *test_data = "test";

int main(int argc, const char *argv[]) {
  int fd = open("test.mm", O_RDONLY);
  if (fd &l


                        
                        
                            answered 2011-05-10T16:25:11.093

mmap, msync and linux process termination

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