Chapter 25. Signal-Driven I/O

Introduction

When using signal-driven I/O, the kernel notifies us with a signal when something happens on a descriptor. Historically, this has been called asynchronous I/O, but the signal-driven I/O that we will describe is not true asynchronous I/O. The latter is normally defined as the process performing the I/O operation (say a read or write), with the kernel returning immediately after the kernel initiates the I/O operation. The process continues executing while the I/O takes place. Some form of notification is then provided to the process when the operation is complete or encounters an error. We compared the various types of I/O that are normally available in Section 6.2 and showed the difference between signal-driven ...

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