Mastering I/O: Why Systems Engineers Need to Adopt io_uring

For systems engineers chasing high throughput and low latency, the introduction of io_uring into the Linux kernel (since 5.1) has been a game-changer. Moving away from the traditional blocking and asynchronous I/O models—epoll and posix AIO—io_uring utilizes a novel shared memory mechanism involving two ring buffers (submission and completion) to facilitate efficient communication between user space and the kernel.

The primary advantages are undeniable: it eliminates the overhead of system call executions by batching requests and handles massive I/O loads with a constant CPU footprint. While the learning curve is steeper due to the liburing wrapper and setup complexity, the performance gains for database engines, storage systems, and high-frequency trading platforms are massive. For modern engineering, io_uring is no longer just an experiment; it is the new standard for I/O.