IO_uring Sees More Improvements With Linux 5.7 For This Exciting I/O Tech

Within minutes of Linux 5.6 being released on Sunday evening, Jens Axboe was already with sending in the start of the various storage areas to the kernel that he oversees with their feature updates for Linux 5.7.

IO_uring is one of the most exciting happenings in the Linux storage space since its introduction last year in Linux 5.1. With succeeding kernels, IO_uring has continued seeing more features implemented, performance optimizations, and other improvements. That is continuing to happen with the Linux 5.7 kernel now in development.

At a high level, IO_uring allows for faster and more efficient I/O by avoiding excess copies and other efficiency improvements like even being able to do I/O without a system call. Our IO_uring benchmarks continue to show how much potential it has and it's only getting better.

For Linux 5.7 there is a rework to the pollable async I/O, support for expendable buffer selection, support for splice, async work fixes, improved IO-WQ locking, hashed link write improvements, and a variety of other improvements and optimizations.

The complete list of IO_uring material for Linux 5.7 can be found via this pull request. Linux 5.7 IO_uring benchmarks will be coming up on Phoronix in due course and this year we are hoping to see more projects making use of this exciting kernel technology.