Proposal for adding O_DIRECT support into JDK 9

[Alan Burlison]

As has been pointed out already, platforms other than Linux provide 
similar functionality, yet this proposal does not provide any support 
for them. Even if such support isn't added initially, the APIs added for 
the Linux implementation should be generic enough that direct IO support 
could be added for other platforms in the future, and that Java code 
using direct IO on Linux would work on other direct IO enabled platforms 
as well. My concern is that the proposed APIs are too Linux-specific to 
make that possible.

I'm well aware of the issues in things like Hadoop and Apache Spark, 
their over-reliance on platform-specific functionality and native code 
has made it extremely difficult to get them to work well on platforms 
other than Linux/x86. We should not make the same mistake in Java itself.

-- 
Alan Burlison
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