UFS Direct I/O

Many customers are interested in placing data directly on disk without buffering it in memory. The Solaris 2.6 release provides direct I/O to do this. Bulk I/O operations use large buffer sizes to transfer large files (files larger than physical memory). An example of a bulk I/O operation is downloading large amounts of satellite data to a file.

Direct I/O data is read or written into a process's address space without incurring the overhead of the operating system's page caching mechanism.

See the directio(3C)man page for more information.