Even Torvalds pronounces it ‚fairly sane‘
Column A few years ago developers knew eBPF as a handy way to build firewalls yet now it’s used everywhere for everything. Get ready for io_uring to do the same.
Most people don’t know the first thing about Linux programming. Why should they? Linux, more so than most operating systems, just works. But under the surface, there are programs such as eBPF that are transforming the infrastructure under the operating system we use every day.
As revealed this week, Microsoft chose to port eBPF into Windows rather than try to duplicate its functionality with its own program. io_uring may become the next Swiss-Army tool for Linux developers.
Io_uring allows Linux to launch an operation asynchronously and wait for its completion. Unlike its asynchronous I/O (AIO) subsystem, its predecessor, io_uring uses a memory ring buffer shared between user space and the Linux kernel. This enables it to submit operations and collect the results without needing time-expensive Linux kernel calls. Its API is complex, but if your applications require lots of I/O, you get rewarded with vastly improved increased performance.
When I say „lots“ of I/O I mean massive I/O calls, gigabytes and beyond.
