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Asynchronous buffered file I/OAsynchronous buffered file I/OPosted Jan 9, 2007 8:11 UTC (Tue) by ldo (subscriber, #40946)Parent article: Asynchronous buffered file I/O
Some operating systems from nearly thirty years ago were already providing this feature, in a very simple way: decouple I/O from process scheduling. This way, there is no distinction between "synchronous" and "asynchronous" I/O in the kernel at all--as far as the kernel is concerned, all I/O operations are asynchronous. Instead, the distinction is implemented entirely in userspace. The synchronous versions of the I/O calls actually make two kernel calls: "request I/O operation" followed by "wait for completion". No need for special paths through the kernel for handling synchronous versus asynchronous kinds of I/O operations.
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Asynchronous buffered file I/O Posted Jan 9, 2007 16:53 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] The problem is that the vast majority of all I/O ops are synchronous, so needing multiple syscalls for them is unnecessary overhead. (You might think `who cares, the I/O will dominate', but it may not with e.g. fast network cards).
Plus, synchronous I/O was there first (I suspect this is the *real* reason why it gets syscalls of its own).
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