Niall Douglas writes:

Such a design would not make good use of hardware DMA such that use of the CPU can be completely avoided for bulk data transfers. To invoke hardware DMA, all i/o must be done from 4Kb aligned memory buffers. Indeed AFIO can enforce that for you because it's so important to performance.

Generally if you're bothering to use async i/o, you have no interest in *ever* copying memory. That rules out all serialisation usually :)

How about calling it OS-level serialization? I don't think the need for message framing goes away. Somehow the length of a message has to be calculated and put in place. -- Brian Ebenezer Enterprises - In G-d we trust. http://webEbenezer.net