Understanding Modern Storage APIs: A systematic study of libaio, SPDK, and io-uring

Abstract

Recent high-performance storage devices have exposed software inefficiencies in existing storage stacks, leading to a new breed of I/O stacks. The newest storage API of the Linux kernel is io-uring. We perform one of the first in-depth studies of io-uring, and compare its performance and dis-/advantages with the established libaio and SPDK APIs. Our key findings reveal that (i) polling design significantly impacts performance; (ii) with enough CPU cores io-uring can deliver performance close to that of SPDK; and (iii) performance scalability over multiple CPU cores and devices requires careful consideration and necessitates a hybrid approach. Last, we provide design guidelines for developers of storage intensive applications.