Block Sizes

[Mark Hahn]

> I wonder if you could use fread/fwrite, some clever malloc'ing of a
> large buffer, and some simple API to create something similar under
> Linux.

Linux *has* O_DIRECT.  it has raw devices.  it has mmap.  sendfile.
checksum offloading.  tcp offloading.  basically, if you're not seeing
great IO under linux, you need to take a look at what you're doing wrong,
because the pieces are all there.  you may have to use a newer kernel 
to get specific features (some of the above are 2.5/2.6 only, I think),
and almost certainly your runtime has lagged the kernel...