Comment by kinds_02_barrel
3 days ago
Really nice paper.
The practical guidelines are useful. Basically “first prove I/O is actually your bottleneck, then change the architecture to use async/batching, and only then reach for features like fixed buffers / zero-copy / passthrough / polling.”
I'm curious, how sensitive are the results to kernel version & deployment environments? Some folks run LTS kernels and/or containers where io_uring may be restricted by default.
Thank you for the feedback on the paper and the guidelines. Regarding kernel versions: io_uring is under very active development (see the plot at https://x.com/Tobias__Ziegler/status/1997256242230915366). @axboe and team regularly push new features and fixes out. Therefore, some features (e.g., zero-copy receive) require very new kernels. Regarding deployments: Please refer to the other discussions regarding cloud deployment and containers. Besides the discussed limitations, some features (e.g., zero-copy receive) also require up-to-date drivers, and hence, results are also sensitive to the used hardware. Note that the three key features of io_uring (unified interface, async, batching) are available in very early kernels. As our paper demonstrates, these are the key aspects that unlock architectural (and the biggest per) improvements.