On Mar 1, 2007, at 10:22 AM, jonathan@dsg.stanford.edu wrote:

> Well, the typical way to implement AIO is to have a pool of kernel
> threads. Grab a kernel thread, issue the i/o, using the kernel thread
> as the thread which blocks until the I/O is complete.  Then the kernel
> thread posts completion to the AIO subsystem, which passes appropriate
> status, signal info, etc. to the requesting thread.  Hmmmm,  
> continuations :-/.

...and that's an awful way to do it considering how all of the  
underlying primitives that those blocking APIs use are asynchronous.

-- thorpej