Asynchronous I/O

In most situations there is no need for asynchronous I/O, since its effects can be achieved with the use of threads, with each thread doing synchronous I/O. However, in a few situations, threads cannot achieve what asynchronous I/O can.

The most straightforward example is writing to a tape drive to make the tape drive stream. Streaming prevents the tape drive from stopping while it is being written to and moves the tape forward at high speed while supplying a constant stream of data that is written to tape.

To do this, the tape driver in the kernel must issue a queued write request when the tape driver responds to an interrupt that indicates that the previous tape-write operation has completed.

Threads cannot guarantee that asynchronous writes will be ordered because the order in which threads execute is indeterminate. Specifying the order of a write to a tape, for example, is not possible.

Asynchronous I/O Operations

#include <sys/asynch.h>

int aioread(int fildes, char *bufp, int bufs, off_t offset,
    int whence, aio_result_t *resultp);

int aiowrite(int filedes, const char *bufp, int bufs,
    off_t offset, int whence, aio_result_t *resultp);

aio_result_t *aiowait(const struct timeval *timeout);

int aiocancel(aio_result_t *resultp);

aioread(3AIO) and aiowrite(3AIO) are similar in form to pread(2) and pwrite(2), except for the addition of the last argument. Calls to aioread() and aiowrite() result in the initiation (or queueing) of an I/O operation.

The call returns without blocking, and the status of the call is returned in the structure pointed to by resultp. This is an item of type aio_result_t that contains the following:

int aio_return;
int aio_errno;

When a call fails immediately, the failure code can be found in aio_errno. Otherwise, this field contains AIO_INPROGRESS, meaning that the operation has been successfully queued.

You can wait for an outstanding asynchronous I/O operation to complete by calling aiowait(3AIO). This returns a pointer to the aio_result_t structure supplied with the original aioread(3AIO) or aiowrite(3) call.

This time aio_result_t contains whatever read(2) or write(2) would have returned if one of them had been called instead of the asynchronous version. If the read() or write() is successful, aio_return contains the number of bytes that were read or written; if it was not successful, aio_return is -1, and aio_errno contains the error code.

aiowait() takes a timeout argument, which indicates how long the caller is willing to wait. As usual, a NULL pointer here means that the caller is willing to wait indefinitely, and a pointer to a structure containing a zero value means that the caller is unwilling to wait at all.

You might start an asynchronous I/O operation, do some work, then call aiowait() to wait for the request to complete. Or you can use SIGIO to be notified, asynchronously, when the operation completes.

Finally, a pending asynchronous I/O operation can be cancelled by calling aiocancel(). This routine is called with the address of the result area as an argument. This result area identifies which operation is being cancelled.