UFS Direct Input/Output (I/O)

Direct I/O is intended to boost bulk I/O operations. Bulk I/O operations use large buffer sizes to transfer large files (larger than 256 KB).

Using UFS direct I/O might benefit applications, such as database engines, that do their own internal buffering. UFS direct I/O allows the same kind of I/O concurrency that occurs when raw devices are accessed. Now you can get the benefit of file system naming and flexibility with very little performance penalty. Check with your database vendor to see if it can enable UFS direct I/O in its product configuration options.

Direct I/O can also be enabled on a file system by using the forcedirectio option to the mount command. Enabling direct I/O is a performance benefit only when a file system is transferring large amounts of sequential data.

When a file system is mounted with this option, data is transferred directly between a user's address space and the disk. When forced direct I/O is not enabled for a file system, data transferred between a user's address space and the disk is first buffered in the kernel address space.

The default behavior is no forced direct I/O on a UFS file system. For more information, see mount_ufs(1M).