Zebin Ren presents his work at CHEOPS’23 (co-located with EuroSys’23), Rome
Zebin Ren, 1st year PhD student in our group presented his research work at 2023 Workshop on Challenges and Opportunities of Efficient and Performant Storage Systems (CHEOPS) in Rome, Italy on May 8th, 2023. https://cheops-workshop.github.io/.
Title: Performance Characterization of Modern Storage Stacks: POSIX I/O, libaio, SPDK, and io_uring
Authors: Zebin Ren and Animesh Trivedi (VU Amsterdam)
Abstract: Linux storage stack offers a variety of storage I/O stacks and APIs such as POSIX I/O, asynchronous I/O (libaio), high-performance asynchronous I/O (emerging io_uring) or SPDK, the last of which completely bypasses the kernel. Despite their availability, there has not been a systematic study of their performance and overheads. In order to aid our understanding, in this work we systematically characterize performance, scalability and microarchitectural properties of popular Linux I/O APIs on high-performance storage hardware (Intel Optane SSDs). Our characterization reveals that: (1) at low I/O loads, all APIs perform competitively with each other, with polling helping the performance by 1.7X, but consuming 2.3X CPU instructions; (2) at high-loads and scale, io_uring is more than an order of magnitude slower than SPDK; (3) at high-loads and scale, the benchmarking tool (fio) itself becomes a bottleneck; (4) state-of-practice Linux block I/O schedulers (BFQ, mq-deadline, and Kyber) introduce significant (up to 50%) overheads, and their use of global locks hinder their scalability. All artifacts from this work are available at https://github.com/atlarge-research/Performance-Characterization-Storage-Stacks.
ACM: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3578353.3589545