LOL ;-) Yup. Saw that. He also said that raw partitions were a bad thing. Unfortunately/Fortunately, he doesn't know everything. Neither raw partitions or directio are going anywhere :)

Perhaps I should explain myself: The problem is that while Linus is extremely good at what he does, he isn't always able to see the needs of the users. In this case, raw partitions and O_DIRECT are used heavily in the DBMS community because they are the best tools that we have. The methods suggested by Linus in his post months ago, aren't able to ensure reliability or performance needed by the DBMS systems. These DBMS systems are used in mission critical environments where an outage of a few minutes can be tens of thousands of dollars. Preventing corruption in the database (either physical or logical) is critical.

I highly doubt that raw partitions or O_DIRECT will be going anywhere anytime soon. What I do expect is a rewrite of the O_DIRECT mechanism to appease Linus and others. :)