Gasp!

[Bill Stoddard]

>
> "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.

>
> 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).

Bill