DeLiBA-K: Speeding-up Hardware-Accelerated Distributed Storage Access by Tighter Linux Kernel Integration and Use of a Modern API

We present DeLiBA-K, an improved version of the Development of Linux Block I/O Accelerators (DeLiBA) framework. DeLiBA-K operates at the Linux kernel level, bypassing the user-space interactions of DeLiBA-1 and -2 to interact with the block and network I/O kernel stack directly. Another critical feature of DeLiBA-K is implementing and benchmarking the modern io_uring Asynchronous I/O (AIO) API within a 16nm AMD Alveo U280 FPGA I/O framework. This allows for better parallelism and reduced latency in I/O operations. Our results show significant performance gains, up to a 3.2x improvement in I/O operations per second (IOPS) and 3.45x increased throughput for synthetic workloads. Real-world applications see a 30% reduction in execution time for data-intensive tasks. DeLiBA-K has been successfully tested in an industrial environment using real workloads, demonstrating its effectiveness in large-scale enterprise environments.