Asynchronous I/O

Asynchronous I/O is supported if the program is linked against the POSIX thread library. If that is not the case, all I/O is performed as synchronous. On systems which do not support pthread condition variables, such as AIX, I/O is also performed as synchronous.

On some systems, such as Darwin or Solaris, the POSIX thread library is always linked in, so asynchronous I/O is always performed. On other sytems, such as Linux, it is necessary to specify -pthread, -lpthread or -fopenmp during the linking step.