There are two advantages:

* Direct I/O allows to avoid the write-back cache, so it reduces affects
  to other processes in the system.
* Async I/O allows to handle a few commands concurrently.

DIO + AIO shows a better perfomance for random write operations:

Mode: O_DSYNC Async: 1
$ ./fio --bs=4K --direct=1 --rw=randwrite --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=64 --name=/dev/sda --runtime=20 --numjobs=2
  WRITE: bw=45.9MiB/s (48.1MB/s), 21.9MiB/s-23.0MiB/s (22.0MB/s-25.2MB/s), io=919MiB (963MB), run=20002-20020msec

Mode: O_DSYNC Async: 0
$ ./fio --bs=4K --direct=1 --rw=randwrite --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=64 --name=/dev/sdb --runtime=20 --numjobs=2
  WRITE: bw=1607KiB/s (1645kB/s), 802KiB/s-805KiB/s (821kB/s-824kB/s), io=31.8MiB (33.4MB), run=20280-20295msec

Known issue:

DIF (PI) emulation doesn't work when a target uses async I/O, because
DIF metadata is saved in a separate file, and it is another non-trivial
task how to synchronize writing in two files, so that a following read
operation always returns a consisten metadata for a specified block.

Cc: "Nicholas A. Bellinger" <nab@linux-iscsi.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Bryant G. Ly <bryantly@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Tested-by: Bryant G. Ly <bryantly@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrei Vagin <avagin@openvz.org>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: Bryant G. Ly <bryantly@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Mike Christie <mchristi@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>