Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:

>No, all you can infer from that is that "some method for avoiding
>small packets is important for networking."  TCP_CORK already does
>that in Linux, for tcp at least, without requiring writev.  (Of
>course, normal nonblocking writev is still there if you want it.)
>
TCP_CORK is indeed effective for avoiding small packets.  Be that as it 
may, the source data for network writes are frequently in discontiguous 
buffers and writev is nonetheless still important for networking.  The 
alternative in the aio model is to waste a lot of resources delivering 
io completions the application doesn't care about.