Over the course of the last three chapters, we have touched on all aspects of file I/O in Linux. In Chapter 2, we looked at the basics of Linux file I/O—really, the basis of Unix programming—with system calls such as read(), write(), open(), and close(). In Chapter 3, we discussed user-space buffering and the standard C library’s implementation thereof. In this chapter, we discussed various facets of advanced I/O, from the more-powerful-but-more-complex I/O system calls to optimization techniques and the dreaded performance-sucking disk seek.

In the next two chapters, we will look at process management: creating, destroying, and managing processes. Onward! 

 * Note that other Unix systems may set errno to EINVAL if count is 0. This is explicitly allowed by the standards, which say that EINVAL may be set if that value is 0, or that the system can handle the zero case in some other (nonerror) way.

* Epoll was introduced in the 2.5.44 development kernel, and the interface was finalized as of 2.5.66.

* Read operations are technically also nonsynchronized, like write operations, but the kernel ensures that the page cache contains up-to-date data. That is, the page cache’s data is always identical to or newer than the data on disk. In this manner, the behavior in practice is always synchronized. There is little argument for behaving any other way.

* Limits on the absolute size of this block number are largely responsible for the various limits on total drive sizes over the years.

* Yes, the man has an I/O scheduler named after him. I/O schedulers are sometimes called elevator algorithms, because they solve a problem similar to that of keeping an elevator running smoothly.

* The following text discusses the CFQ I/O Scheduler as it is currently implemented. Previous incarnations did not use timeslices or the anticipation heuristic, but operated in a similar fashion.

* One should apply the techniques discussed here only to I/O-intensive, mission-critical applications. Sorting the I/O requests—assuming there is even anything to sort—of applications that do not issue many such requests is silly and unneeded