The Linux-native asynchronous I/O facility ("async I/O", or "aio") has a richer API and capability set than the simple POSIX async I/O facility. This library, libaio, provides the Linux-native API for async I/O. The POSIX async I/O facility requires this library in order to provide kernel-accelerated async I/O capabilities, as do applications which require the Linux-native async I/O API.