> > Is there any point to using threaded FS drivers? or threaded physical
> > hardware drivers?
>
> The Linux file system drivers have been threaded for ages. Multiple
> processes can access different files in an overlapping fashion; while
> one process is waiting for a request to complete, the file system might
> already look into the request of another process.
>
> There are a few places where concurrent access is not desirable, Linux
> supports locks on the inode level and on the superblock level for
> these cases.
Actually - I was thinking of actual asynchronous FS-management...
Where, say, a kernel thread was being used to manage the device rather
than the local process... (as it is currently :)
Though, thinking about this, there's really not a lot of point to it
unless you have a multi-CPU system and want to dedicate one CPU (or more)
to filesystem-management/caching or the like. (or other special purpose
such as 3D graphics layer on a real accelerated card - where kernel-thread
is a necessity not an option [IRQ's (+DMA) are required] :)
In other words - only a special case thingy... Okay ;)
G'day, eh? :)
- Teunis