bloonix,
First, 16384 = 16 * 1024 or 16KB. If you read stat, you will see that the call would be returning the preferred block size for filesystem IO. This appears to be setting a default if there is not one returned. Without further context, it is hard to say for sure if it actually does that. How is the variable used elsewhere in the program? 16K -> 16KB thanks to shmem.