Agreed. You can live without AIO.
You'd be *amazed* at the push-back I got from various sources, though, when I suggested turning on I/O slaves. After all, that's "obsolete", isn't it? ;-) (Not!)
But it *sucks* when you don't *know* you're living without it. I recently saw this happen to a client who had migrated from DAS to NFS (without doing enough homework). The first hint that AIO was not in use manifested months later with the deployment of a new application and the sudden appearance of huge numbers of block_buffer waits, incomplete checkpoints, and all manner of other bad things resulting from the (Synchronous) DBWR being unable to write fast enough.
Sadly, unless (and until) you know exactly *where* to look, it is almost impossible to determine whether or not the database is actually *performing* Asynch I/O. (As most here undoubtedly realise, looking for DISK_AYNCH_IO=TRUE does *not* do the job!)
(Almost) just for chuckles, I opened an SR with Oracle support, asking questions like "how can I test whether my DB is doing Asynch I/O on Linux?" and "knowing that Asynch I/O is unsupported, what are the risks of doing so anyway?". After almost two weeks, the questions are unanswered, even though I was able to answer them myself with less than an hour of surfing Metalink and Google.
For the record: "cat /proc/slabinfo", and "there is no risk -- the Linux kernel will stop you" respectively appear to be the answers to these questions. And hat's off (again) to Werner Puschitz for his excellent website -- the information I found there seems to be a good deal better than Metalink...
Anyway, this is a large part of where the homework comes in. Those who fail to do it probably won't even suspect that AIO is not being used until *long* after they start using NFS. Of course, that might beg the question: if it has no observable affect, is it *really* a problem? But I'll leave that one to the philosophers to ponder. I *know* I won't bother to ask OSS. ;-)
[...]
Asynch I/O is not that important. Oracle can emulate it using I/O slaves. Granted, it's not as good as the real thing, but you will not sufer much, either. Direct I/O is much more important and it is supported. FC5 is the sign of things to come. It does support full NFS4 version, with cient caching and async I/O included. EL5 is likely to have those features, minus bugs, discovered by free beta testers, like me.
-- Mladen Gogala http://www.mgogala.com
-- Cheers, -- Mark Brinsmead Staff DBA, The Pythian Group http://www.pythian.com/blogs