Re: Streaming disk I/O kills file buffering and makes Linux unusable

Peter Monta (pmonta@halibut.imedia.com)
Mon, 23 Aug 1999 10:06:43 -0700


> Will future kernels ave an O_DIRECT like flag to avoid caching ?

Stephen Tweedie has written a patch for unbuffered I/O; the URL I have
from some time ago is

ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/sct/fs/raw-io

though this host doesn't seem to respond at the moment. I believe
Stephen has mentioned that this will go into the main tree at some point.
(Possibly it's already in 2.3.x---I haven't looked recently.)

> I think without some buffer-cache usage limiting, or buffering disabling,
> Linux is actually UNSUITABLE for streaming applications which do run
> concurrently with other apps.

I agree; the raw-io system will make this much more pleasant.

Cheers,
Peter Monta pmonta@imedia.com
Imedia Corp.

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