Does with-aio-support work?

[Yuehai Xu]

Hi all,

The version of my samba is 3.3.2 and I rebuild it with the configure
"--with-aio-suport". Then, I just follow the man of smb.conf, adding "
aio read size = 1" to my smb.conf. The, the read request dispatched by
smbd should be asynchronous, is that correct?

I am puzzled about it. I use another Linux machine mount a certain
directory of my samba server with cifs, then, I start 4 processes to
read files in this directory concurrently. In order to avoid
readahead, I set the stride size between each read request of a
process to 8K, in that way, readahead should not work. According to
the man, the requests from different process should be asynchronous to
each other.

I know that if I run processes in different machine, multi smbds will
handle these requests and they are of course asynchronous, however,
will a smbd handle all requests from a client? If there are several
processes in this client, are the requests async? I trace the requests
using blktrace, and find that even I have set "aio read size = 1", all
the requests are sync because I use only one client machine on which
there are multi processes.

So, I am wondering, what does asynchronous here really mean?

Thanks,
Yuehai