Forms
All forms of asynchronous I/O open applications up to potential resource conflicts and associated failure. Careful programming (often using mutual exclusion, semaphores, etc.) is required to prevent this.
When exposing asynchronous I/O to applications there are a few broad classes of implementation. The form of the API provided to the application does not necessarily correspond with the mechanism actually provided by the operating system; emulations are possible. Furthermore, more than one method may be used by a single application, depending on its needs and the desires of its programmer(s). Many operating systems provide more than one of these mechanisms, it is possible that some may provide all of them.
Read more about this topic: Asynchronous I/O
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