Open Source Summit Europe 2022

Applications are increasingly integrating high-performance I/O interfaces such as Linux io_uring, userspace device drivers, and vhost-user device support. The effort required to add each of these low-level interfaces into an application is relatively high. libblkio provides a single open source API for efficiently accessing block devices and eliminates the need to write custom code for each one. Designed to work on bare metal, inside containers, and in virtual machines, libblkio enables applications to run in each of these environments without rewriting code. Blocking, event-driven, and polling mode are supported and give applications the choice of I/O model, making it easy to integrate libblkio into existing applications. The new libblkio QEMU block driver and fio ioengine allow virtual machines and benchmarking workloads to take advantage of libblkio today. We will discuss the libblkio API design, available drivers, and roadmap so that more applications can benefit from libblkio.