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From: "Adam L. Beberg" <beberg@mithral.com>
To: Bill Stoddard <bill@wstoddard.com>
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Subject: RE: Gasp!
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Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2002 16:59:24 -0700 (PDT)

On Sun, 1 Sep 2002, Bill Stoddard wrote:

> >
> > "Red Hat Linux Advanced Server provides many high end features such as:
> > Support for Asynchronous I/O. Now read I/O no longer needs to stall your
> > application while waiting for completion."
>
> Can you provide a reference?  I could find it myself but I'm too lazy.

Well, i saw it on the Compaq Testdrive site, then had to seriously dig on
the redhat site... It's in one of their whitepapers...
http://www.redhat.com/pdf/as/as_rasm.pdf


> > Could it be? After 20 years without this feature UNIX finally
> > catches up to
> > Windows and has I/O that doesnt totally suck for nontrivial apps? No way!
>
> Do /dev/poll and FreeBSD's KQ event driven APIs count? IMHO, true async
> io as implemented by Windows 4.0 and beyond is pretty slick, but the
> programming model is substantially more complex than programming to an
> event API like /dev/poll. And true async does not buy much if the
> system call overhead is low (as it is with Linux).

I havent used the FBSD poll, as it's not portable, select and poll(still not
100%) are all that exist in the UNIX world. Redhat of course doesnt count as
portable either, but it's nice they are trying. The Windows I/O model does
definately blow the doors off the UNIX one, but then they had select to
point at in it's suckiness and anything would have been an improvement. UNIX
is just now looking at it's I/O model and adapting to a multiprocess
multithreaded world so it's gonna be years yet before a posix API comes out
of it. Bottom line is the "do stuff when something happens" model turned out
to be right, and the UNIX "look for something to do and keep looking till
you find it no matter how many times you have to look" is not really working
so great anymore.

- Adam L. "Duncan" Beberg
  http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/
  beberg@mithral.com


