I had the wrong idea about this. Thanks to Sergey for pointing it out!
Here's what he says (reproduced for posterity):
> Private mappings protect the underlying file from the changes made by
> you, not the other way around. To quote POSIX, "If MAP_PRIVATE is
> specified, modifications to the mapped data by the calling process
> shall be visible only to the calling process and shall not change the
> underlying object. It is unspecified whether modifications to the
> underlying object done after the MAP_PRIVATE mapping is established
> are visible through the MAP_PRIVATE mapping." In practice that means
> that the pages that were already paged in don't get updated when the
> underlying file changes, and the pages that weren't paged in yet will
> load the latest data at that moment.
> The only thing MAP_FILE | MAP_PRIVATE is really useful for is mapping
> a library and performing relocations; it's definitely useless (and
> actively harmful for the system memory usage) if you only read from
> the file.
This effectively reverts e2697c2ddd.
ecfde5997b