Christoph Hellwig

Linux gained the first publicly release driver for the then new NVM Express standard in early 2011. It went through a lot of changes since then, including the move the new blk-mq block driver infrastructure, the addition of NVMe over Fabrics support including the split of the driver into a common core and transport drivers and the addition of lots of feature since then.

This presentation gives an overview over the problems of the existing Linux storage stack when dealing with low-latency and high IOPS devices, and explains how these are addressed by the blk-mq and scsi-mq frameworks. The blk-mq framework provides a replacement for the lower half of the Linux block layer and allows drivers to be written in a way that allows them to handle low-latency I/O and a high number of IOPS, as well as scale better to large number of CPUs.

This talks explains the exciting new features in the Linux NVMe driver and software target in the last two years, as well as the relevant block layer changes to support these features.