aio in GENERIC?

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2012, Matthew Jacob wrote:

> What practically does aio offer that is not achieved via pthreads other than 
> slightly simpler code?

Although the VFS side of the AIO code blocks kernel threads during in-progress 
I/O, the socket side is able to do fully asynchronous I/O down the stack 
without committing a kernel thread to it.  As such, it probably is actually 
significantly more scalable, allowing larger numbers of simultaneous 
outstanding I/Os in the network layer, and more efficiently than simply using 
threads.

Robert