Linux block subsystem maintainer and lead IO_uring developer Jens Axboe had a goal of hitting 7M IOPS per-core performance this week . On Monday he managed to already hit 7.2M IOPS and today hit 7.4M IOPS with his latest work-in-progress kernel patches.

This month Jens Axboe has been making some remarkable improvements to the Linux block code for squeezing out every bit of I/O potential of the system. Yesterday Jens Axboe was hitting 7.2M IOPS with new persistent DMA map patches that also shaved off around 10% of synchronization latency.

As for his approach to squeezing out these gains with the Linux I/O stack, Axboe commented on Monday, " I've just been whack-a-moling the obvious culprits and trying to think about new ways we can do things rather than try and just shave cycles off the existing methods. "

When the news can't really keep up:

IOPS=7412800, BW=3619MiB/s, IOS/call=32/31, inflight=(96 103)
IOPS=7446080, BW=3635MiB/s, IOS/call=32/32, inflight=(78 100)

7M? Pffft, easy. https://t.co/7hzSfku2lA

— Jens Axboe (@axboe) October 12, 2021

Today he's celebrating 7.4M IOPS per-core using Intel Optane Gen2 storage and an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor.

These various improvements are being housed in linux-block's "perf-wip" branch . Hopefully at least most of these changes will be ready in time for the upcoming Linux 5.16 merge window.