Zero a large memory mapping with `madvise`

Question

I have the following problem:

I allocate a large chunk of memory (multiple GiB) via mmap with MAP_ANONYMOUS. That chunk holds a large hash map w

Answer 1

There is a much easier solution to your problem that is fairly portable:

mmap(ptr, length, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_FIXED|MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0);

Since MAP_FIXED is permitted to fail for fairly arbitrary implementation-specific reasons, falling back to memset if it returns MAP_FAILED would be advisable.