I started using Ubuntu recently and trying to install some packages and came across the package libaio, what is the purpose of this package and when we need to install this on Ubuntu?
libaio is Linux kernel asynchronous I/O (AIO). AIO enables even a single application thread to overlap I/O operations with other processing, by providing an interface for submitting one or more I/O requests in one system call without waiting for completion, and a separate interface to reap completed I/O operations associated with a given completion group.
In Ubuntu widely known applications like mysql (database engine) and qemu (virtual machine) are depending on this library. You don't need to install libaio manually. When you install apps using Synaptic or Ubuntu Software Center or using apt-get from command line, this library will be installed automatically.