zIO - Accelerating IO-Intensive Applications with Transparent Zero-Copy IO

Explore a conference talk from OSDI '22 that introduces zIO, a transparent zero-copy IO mechanism designed to accelerate IO-intensive applications without requiring modifications. Learn how zIO tracks IO data through applications, eliminating unnecessary copies while maintaining data consistency. Discover the innovative approach of leveraging the insight that applications often modify only part of the processed data, and how zIO interposes on IO stack and standard library memory copy calls to achieve this. Understand the tracking policy that decides when to eliminate copies on a per IO basis, balancing performance gains with overhead. Delve into the implementation of zIO as a user-space library and its integration with both kernel IO stacks and kernel-bypass IO stacks. Examine the performance improvements achieved with zIO, including up to 1.8x throughput increase with Linux and up to 2.5x with kernel-bypass IO stacks and optimistic network receiver persistence. Compare zIO's performance to common zero-copy IO stack APIs and understand its advantages in reducing TLB shootdown overhead.