The "i10" scheduler is the proposal for this new Linux I/O solution to amortize the remote access latency while increasing I/O throughput.
The i10 I/O scheduler proposal sent out by Rachit Agarwal explains that it " performs batching per hctx in terms of #requests, #bytes, and timeouts (at microseconds granularity). i10 starts dispatching only when #requests or #bytes is larger than a default threshold or when a timer expires. After that, batching dispatch would happen, allowing batching at device drivers along with "bd->last" and ".commit_rqs"...We have tested the i10 I/O scheduler with nvme-tcp optimizaitons and batching dispatch, varying number of cores, varying read/write ratios, and varying request sizes, and with NVMe SSD and RAM block device. For NVMe SSDs, the i10 I/O scheduler achieves ~60% improvements in terms of IOPS per core over "noop" I/O scheduler...While other schedulers may also batch I/O (e.g., mq-deadline), the optimization target in the i10 I/O scheduler is throughput maximization. Hence there is no latency target nor a need for a global tracking context, so a new scheduler is needed rather than to build this functionality to an existing scheduler. "
The i10 scheduler was born out of research from Cornell University.
More details on the proposed i10 Linux I/O scheduler via the kernel mailing list .