The unix version of mmap doesn't grow the file automatically, but you can just write zeros to the file yourself, something like:
size = 83456
self.file = open("/tmp/installer.ipk", "w+b")
self.file.write("\0" * size)
self.file.flush()
self.mm = mmap.mmap(self.file.fileno(), size, access=mmap.ACCESS_WRITE)