Why is direct I/O file not being written to? - c

Question

I am trying to understand direct I/O. To that end I have written this little toy code, which is merely supposed to open a file and write a text string to it:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
char thefile[64];
int fd;
char message[64]="jsfreowivanlsaskajght";
sprintf(thefile, "diotestfile.dat");
if ((fd = open(thefile,O_DIRECT | O_RDWR | O_CREAT, S_IRWXU)) == -1) {
printf("error opening file\n");
exit(1);
}
write(fd, message, 64);
close(fd);
}
My compile command for Cray and GNU is
cc -D'_GNU_SOURCE' diotest.c
and for Intel it is
cc -D'_GNU_SOURCE' -xAVX diotest.c
Under all three compilers, the file diotestfile.dat is created with correct permissions, but no data is ever written to it. When the executable finishes, the output file is blank. The O_DIRECT is the culprit (or, more precisely I guess, my mishandling of O_DIRECT). If I take it out, the code works just fine. I have seen this same problem in a much more complex code that I am trying to work with. What is it that I need to do differently?

Answer 1

Going on Ian Abbot's comment, I discovered that the problem can be solved by adding an alignment attribute to the "message" array:
#define BLOCK_SIZE 4096
int bytes_to_write, block_size=BLOCK_SIZE;
bytes_to_write = ((MSG_SIZE + block_size - 1)/block_size)*block_size;
char message[bytes_to_write] __attribute__ ((aligned(BLOCK_SIZE)));
(System I/O block size is 4096.)
So that solved it. Still can't claim to understand everything that is happening. Feel free to enlighten me if you want. Thanks to everyone for the comments.

Answer 2

Well, you need to rethink the question, because your program runs perfectly on my system, and I cannot guess from it's listing where the error can be.
Have you tested it before posting?
if the program doesn't write to the file, probably a good idea is to see about the return code of write(2). Have you done this? I cannot check because on my system (intel 64bit/FreeBSD) the program runs as you expected.
Your program runs, giving no output and a file named diotestfile.dat appeared in the . directory with contents jsfreowivanlsaskajght.
lcu#europa:~$ ll diotestfile.dat
-rwx------ 1 lcu lcu 64 1 feb. 18:14 diotestfile.dat*
lcu#europa:~$ cat diotestfile.dat
jsfreowivanlsaskajghtlcu#europa:~$ _