[ale] aio calls

[Bjorn Dittmer-Roche]

Thanks Fulton,

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Fulton Green wrote:

> I had to do some I/O-intensive development a few years ago, and I did some
> experimenting with AIO as well as the multithreading.  I may have even
> tried a combo for kicks.

I need to get my IO out of one particular (real-time) thread. While
googling, I read that glibc implements it in terms of threads on linux,
rather than providing kernel level support, so the performance isn't hot
if you are dealing with many files. Since I am dealing with only one file,
it doesn't concern me too much as long as I get the IO out of my main
thread, but I found it interesting.

> Since I didn't have a clue what async I/O was before my boss (an S/360
> hacker) explained it to me, I went out and bought a book from O'Reilly
> that covered AIO and some other aspects of the POSIX.4 realtime
> extensions standard:
>
> http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/posix4/
>
> The standard also has some other cool things about it, such as a less
> klutzy API for IPC and the ability to set timers.
>
> Also, Google came up with this page:
>
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/aio_read.html

	Both are very helpful -- especially the page you managed to find
with google but I missed (what did I do wrong!). I was hoping for some
sample code online but I think I can make do with the man pages. I think I
am going to try and implement this as it looks cleaner than managing yet
another thread, and the opengroup seems to have the necessary info on
their site. Stop me if you think that's misguided!

	bjorn