[New-bugs-announce] [issue44738] io_uring as a new backend to selectors and asyncio

[Joongi Kim]

New submission from Joongi Kim <me at daybreaker.info>:

This is a rough early idea suggestion on adding io_uring as an alternative I/O multiplexing mechanism in Python (maybe selectors and asyncio). io_uring is a relatively new I/O mechanism introduced in Linux kernel 5.1 or later.

https://lwn.net/Articles/776703/
https://lwn.net/Articles/810414/
https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/an-introduction-to-the-io_uring-asynchronous-io-framework

The advantages of io_uring over epoll:
 - completion-based
 - less number of syscalls
 - higher performance (https://twitter.com/hielkedv/status/1218891982636027905)
 - file I/O support including read/write/stat/open/close

I'm not sure that io_uring would bring actual performance improvements to Python (and asyncio) or not yet.
We need some exploration and prototyping, but still technically it would be a nice-to-have feature, considering Python's recent speed-up optimizations.
Also io_uring is also intended to support high-speed storage devices such as NVMe, and may be a good addition to asyncio in terms of improved async file I/O support.

Here are existing attempts to incorporate uring in other languages:
 - liburing (C, https://github.com/axboe/liburing)
 - iou, tokio-uring (Rust, https://tokio.rs/blog/2021-07-tokio-uring)

I don't have any estimation on the efforts and time required to do the work,
but just want to spark the discussion. :)

----------
components: asyncio
messages: 398215
nosy: achimnol, asvetlov, corona10, njs, yselivanov
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: io_uring as a new backend to selectors and asyncio
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.11

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue44738>
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