Unless you want to write your own IO thread pool, the glibc implementation is an acceptable solution. It actually works surprisingly well for something that runs entirely in userland. The kernel implementation does not work with buffered IO at all in my experience (though I’ve seen other people say the opposite!). Which is fine if … Read more
Events is one of the paradigms to achieve asynchronous execution. But not all asynchronous systems use events. That is about semantic meaning of these two – one is super-entity of another. epoll and aio use different metaphors: epoll is a blocking operation (epoll_wait()) – you block the thread until some event happens and then you … Read more
On linux, the two AIO implementations are fundamentally different. The POSIX AIO is a user-level implementation that performs normal blocking I/O in multiple threads, hence giving the illusion that the I/Os are asynchronous. The main reason to do this is that: it works with any filesystem it works (essentially) on any operating system (keep in … Read more
Doing socket I/O efficiently has been solved with kqueue, epoll, IO completion ports and the likes. Doing asynchronous file I/O is sort of a late comer (apart from windows’ overlapped I/O and solaris early support for posix AIO). If you’re looking for doing socket I/O, you’re probably better off using one of the above mechanisms. … Read more