Mounting memory buffer as a file without writing to disk

I have a server and needs to feed data from clients to a library; however, that library only supports reading files (it uses open to access the file).

Since the data can get pretty big, I rather not write it out to a temporary file, read it in with the library then delete it afterwards. Instead I would like to do something similar to a ramdisk where there’s a file in which the content is actually in memory.

However, there can be multiple clients sending over large data, I don’t think constantly calling mount and umount to create a ramdisk for each client is efficient. Is there a way for me to mount an existing memory buffer as a file without writing to disk?

• The library does not support taking in a file descriptor nor FILE*. It will only accept a path which it feeds directly to open
• I do have the library’s source code and attempted to add in a function that uses fmemopen; however, fmemopen returns a FILE* with no file descriptor. The internals of the library works only with file descriptors and it is too complex to change/add support to use FILE*
• I looked at mmap, but it appears to be no different than writing out the data to a file
• Using mount requires sudo access and I prefer not to run the application as sudo

bool IS_EXITING = false;
ssize_t getDataSize( int clientFD ) { /* ... */}

void handleClient( int clientFD ) {
  // Read in messages to get actual data size
  ssize_t dataSize = getDataSize( clientFD );

  auto* buffer = new char[ dataSize ];

  // Read in all the data from the client
  ssize_t bytesRead = 0;
  while( bytesRead < dataSize ) {
    int numRead = read( clientFD, buffer + bytesRead, dataSize - bytesRead );
    bytesRead += numRead;
    
    // Error handle if numRead is <= 0
    if ( numRead <= 0 ) { /* ... */ }
  }
  
  // Mount the buffer and get a file path... How to do this
  std::string filePath = mountBuffer( buffer );

  // Library call to read the data
  readData( filePath );

  delete[ ] buffer;
}

void runServer( int socket )
  while( !IS_EXITING ) {
    auto clientFD = accept( socket, nullptr, nullptr );
    // Error handle if clientFD <= 0
    if ( clientFD <= 0 ) { /* ... */ }

    std::thread clientThread( handleClient, clientFD );
    clientThread.detach( ); 
  }
}

>Solution :

Use /dev/fd. Get the file descriptor of the socket, and append that to /dev/fd/ to get the filename.

If the data is in a memory buffer, you could create a thread that writes to a pipe. Use the file descriptor of the read end of the pipe with /dev/fd.