I suppose. Some problems with mmap() are a bit hard to fix from user land though. You will hit contention on locks inside the kernel (mmap_sem) if the database does concurrent high throughput mmap()/unmap(). I don't follow linux kernel development closely to know if this has been improved recently, but it was easy to reproduce it 4-5 years ago.
That makes sense. I wasn't going right to the conclusion that working around mmap() issues was easier, but it didn't seem to be explored much. Is the contention around having one file mmap()ed, or is it reduced if you use more files?
