O_DIRECT please; Sybase 12.5

[Dan Kegel <dank@kegel.com>]

At work I had to sit through a meeting where I heard
the boss say "If Linux makes Sybase go through the page cache on
reads, maybe we'll just have to switch to Solaris.  That's
a serious performance problem."
All I could say was "I expect Linux will support O_DIRECT
soon, and Sybase will support that within a year."  

Er, so did I promise too much?  Andrea mentioned O_DIRECT recently
( http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=99253913516599&w=2,
 http://lwn.net/2001/0510/bigpage.php3 )
Is it supported yet in 2.4, or is this a 2.5 thing?

And what are the chances Sybase will support that flag any time
soon?  I just read on news://forums.sybase.com/sybase.public.ase.linux
that Sybase ASE 12.5 was released today, and a 60 day eval is downloadable
for NT and Linux.  I'm downloading now; it's a biggie.

It supports raw partitions, which is good; that might satisfy my
boss (although the administration will be a pain, and I'm not
sure whether it's really supported by Dell RAID devices).
I'd prefer O_DIRECT :-(

Hope somebody can give me encouraging news.

Thanks,
Dan