In the beginning, the Linux kernel lacked any sort of virtual filesystem layer. See, for example, the 0.01 implementation of read(), which contained explicit checks for each possible file-descriptor ...

CHAPTERS 13 AND 14 DESCRIBED OPENVMS FILES and presented methods for manipulating files as a whole. This chapter begins the presentation of DCL commands that operate on the contents of files: commands ...

It is natural to think of buffered I/O on Unix-like systems as being asynchronous. In Linux, the page cache exists to separate process-level I/O requests from the physical requests sent to the storage ...

You can take advantage of asynchrony to perform resource-intensive I/O operations sans the need to block the main or the executing thread of the application. Asynchrony when used properly can increase ...