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 Kbytes).

An example of a bulk I/O operation is downloading satellite data, which writes large amounts of data to a file. Direct I/O data is read or written into memory without using the overhead of the operating system's page caching mechanism.

There is a potential penalty on direct I/O startup. If a file requested for I/O is already mapped by another application, the pages will have to be flushed out of memory before the direct I/O operation can begin.

See directio(3C) for more information.

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. See mount_ufs(1M) for more information.