Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> writes:
> FreeBSD 4.9 was released today. In the release notes was:
>
> 2.2.6 File Systems
>
> A new DIRECTIO kernel option enables support for read operations that
> bypass the buffer cache and put data directly into a userland
> buffer. This feature requires that the O_DIRECT flag is set on the
> file descriptor and that both the offset and length for the read
> operation are multiples of the physical media sector size.
>
> Is that of any use?
Linux and Solaris have had this for a while. I'm pretty sure it's
been discussed before--search the archives. I think the consensus
was that it might be useful for WAL writes, but would be a fair amount
of work and would introduce portability issues...
-Doug