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Comment by slovenlyrobot | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK Windows handles truly asynchronous buffered IO in some circumstances, but I feel once you're past the point of managing the abstraction or caring about its internal details, it doesn't really matter if there is a tiny chunk of dedicated stack in the kernel, that's a problem for the OS

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IOCP uses a pool of quasi-kernel threads (i.e. schedulable entity with a contiguous stack for storing state) with polling, very much like how io_uring and other incarnations of AIO in the Linux kernel work; and for that matter it's not unlike how purely user space AIO implementations work. The benefit of IOCP and io_uring is there's one less buffer copying operation. The biggest benefit of IOCP, really, is that it's a blackbox that you can depend on, and one that everybody is expected to depend upon. So it can be whatever you want it to be ;)

> OCP uses a pool of quasi-kernel threads

Is there any further documentation for it? I would have expected there doesn't need to be a real stack. Only state-machines for all the IO entities (like sockets) which get advanced whenever an outside event (e.g. interrupt) happens and which then signal the IO completion towards userspace. Didn't expect that it's necessary to keep stacks around.

Yes, IOCP looks like true async I/O most of the time. While in reality it will block if file is cached, in cases if code tries to read something like 100+ MB at a time ReadFile calls can take 200ms+. So most "async I/O" frameworks have to wrap IOCP into a user space thread ...

Or disable caching for specified file when calling CreateFile API

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/n...

Also VMS..

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