Discovered Direct I/O is a file system tunable that is set using the vxtunefs command. When the file system gets an I/O request larger than the discovered_direct_iosz, it tries to use direct I/O on the request. For large I/O sizes, Discovered Direct I/O can perform much better than buffered I/O.

Discovered Direct I/O behavior is similar to direct I/O and has the same alignment constraints, except writes that allocate storage or extend the file size do not require writing the inode changes before returning to the application.