Direct I/O is a feature of the file system whereby file reads and writes go directly from the applications to the storage device, bypassing the operating system read and write caches. Direct I/O is used only by applications (such as databases) that manage their own caches.

An application invokes direct I/O by opening a file with the O_DIRECT flag. Alternatively, GFS can attach a direct I/O attribute to a file, in which case direct I/O is used regardless of how the file is opened.

When a file is opened with O_DIRECT, or when a GFS direct I/O attribute is attached to a file, all I/O operations must be done in block-size multiples of 512 bytes. The memory being read from or written to must also be 512-byte aligned.

One of the following methods can be used to enable direct I/O on a file: