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Friday, October 14, 2005

Asynchronous I/O - The LibQ Way

Okay, so now that I've talked about the challenges in asynchronous I/O, let me explain my solution (the interface, at least; will discuss the implementation later). First of all let me state that this is the working draft of the interface; function names in particular are not final, and the interface may change somewhat.

LibQ supports asynchronous I/O on all OS, and supports all three notifications methods: event notification, completion callbacks, and completion ports.

CAsyncStatus
The object-oriented state of an asynchronous I/O operation. May be either unused, pending, or completed. When completed, contains the information such as the success/failure status of the operation and the number of bytes transferred, as well as the original information about the I/O offset, file, etc. Allocated and freed by the caller, and may be inherited to add caller-owned data associated with the operation.

CCompletionPort
An I/O completion port. Can be associated with one or more files that it should receive completion notifications for. Can be used to retrieve a queued completion (in the form of a CAsyncStatus) or waited on until the next notification is queued (if none are already queued).

CAsyncFile
The class for a file opened for asynchronous I/O. Synchronous I/O is done using Read and Write; asynchronous I/O is done using RequestRead and RequestWrite, both taking a CAsyncStatus for the operation, as well as a CEvent to set or a callback function to call on completion (if neither is specified, the completion notification will be queued on the file's CCompletionPort). The CAsyncStatus must remain valid until the operation is complete.

Completion callbacks are queued to the thread that called RequestRead/RequestWrite, and are not actually called until DispatchNotifications is called from that thread, when all queued notification callbacks are called for that thread.

Uncompleted I/O requests can be cancelled for a file in all threads by calling CAsyncFile::CancelAllIo for that file.

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