LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ELC-E Europe 2014

This presentation gives an overview over the problems of the existing Linux storage stack to deal with low-latency and high IOPS devices, and explains how these are addressed for future Linux releases. Blk-mq provides a replacement for parts of the Linux block layer and allows drivers to support low-latency I/O, and a high number of I/O operations as well as scale better to large number of CPUs. SCSI is the most important enterprise block storage protocol, and thus enabling the SCSI layer to use blk-mq allows to take advantage of it for a wide range of commercially available storage hardware, especially high performance storage arrays. This presentation will explain the high-level details of the architecture of blk-mq and scsi-mq, show performance comparisons to the previous architecture and will show developers how to take advantage of the new capabilities.