Background

For classes of storage systems — such as those used in high performance computing — I/O throughput, memory bandwidth utilization, and efficient use of memory buffers are of utmost importance. After doing some initial investigation into io_uring, I was intrigued by the possibility of using fixed buffers as a means for increasing I/O throughput. However, io_uring only supports the fixed option for requests using a single memory buffer — vectored I/O functions (readv(), writev(), etc.) are not supported. The work here compares fixed and non-fixed performance to provide insight into the trade-offs of using vectored vs. non-vectored buffers.

If you’re…