Terminology: why --synchronous?
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Description
Apologies for being pedantic today :)
Why is direct I/O behind a flag called --synchronous? Shouldn't it be --direct, or --unbuffered?
Using O_DIRECT for open(2) will not impact whether read(2) and write(2) are synchronous.
Excluding sockets with O_NONBLOCK, synchronous / asynchronous is usually a property of the syscall itself. I believe the aio API requires direct (unbuffered) I/O, but that's not the case with the new io_uring API.
You can have asynchronous direct I/O (io_uring, aio), asynchronous buffered I/O (io_uring), synchronous direct I/O (read/write with O_DIRECT), synchronous buffered I/O (read/write).
Also, all of these modes should not be confused with O_SYNC/fdatasync/fsync, which is mostly orthogonal to the above :).
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by locating the CLI definition and all uses of the --synchronous option, then inspect how it maps to open(2) flags such as O_DIRECT. Compare the terminology with the project's handling of buffered, direct, asynchronous, and sync-to-disk I/O. Done means reaching an agreed naming decision and updating every affected user-facing reference consistently.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- c
- Domain
- cli
- Issue type
- Refactor
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100