I've been experimenting with AoE lately, and as a resultI've been looking at the protocol more than I did in my earlierexposure . Unfortunately, the more I look at the AoEprotocol, the more uncomfortable I get.

The AoE protocol is quite simple; requests and replies are simpleEthernet frames, and a request's result must fit in a single replypacket. This means that the maximum read and write sizes per request arebounded by the size of the Ethernet frame, and thus on

I've been considering writing a fully asynchronous ATA over Ethernettarget driver (I'm not entirely happy with the current one and itsperformance). If Linux asynchronous IO worked on sockets (specificallyraw network sockets), there is a nice simple design where you just setup a pool of buffers and then cycle each one through a little statemachine (network in to disk IO to network out).

(This works especially great for AOE because the protocol is both basedon raw packets and completely unordered,

In an aside in a recent entry , I wrote:

With sufficient cleverness, you can construct a version of capture() that is passed store 's name and puts the result in it directly,without needing you to make it an array and use store[0] .

I'm wrong. In Python, no outside power can change a function's localvariables (more precisely, no outside power can change the namebindings , doing the equivalent of ' localvar =something '). While you can