While the kernel has had support for asynchronous
I/O (AIO) since the 2.5
development cycle, it has also had people complaining about AIO for about
that long.  The current interface is seen as difficult to use and
inefficient; additionally, some types of I/O are better supported than
others.  That
situation may be about to change with the introduction of a proposed
new interface from Jens Axboe called "io_uring".  As might be expected
from the name,
io_uring introduces just what the kernel needed more than anything else:
yet another ring buffer.