Now go and read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11864211 . There are those who argue (at some length, q.v.) that "the best bits from Windows NT" are not to have readiness-oriented application designs in the first place.
I was thinking more along the lines of Windows "registered I/O" and Linux "netmap". 'trentnelson' argues for a distinction between readiness and asynchronous. I don't think the distinction needs to exist, and that in an ideal world the disk subsystem would be more like a kind of networking subsystem. If the request can't be satisfied from a RAM buffer, add it to the "outbound requests" list and return to the calling thread. When the corresponding reply eventually turns up from the disk, add it to the input queue of the process.
