Beyond epoll: Rethinking High-Performance Network Runtime with io_uring

epoll has been the foundation of modern high-performance Linux servers for years, powering event-driven systems such as Nginx, Redis, and many async runtimes. However, as workloads continue scaling, the readiness-based model of epoll introduces increasing complexity around event loops, syscall overhead, and asynchronous file I/O.

This talk introduces why Linux developed io_uring, how it differs from epoll, and what architectural changes it brings to modern async runtimes. We will briefly compare epoll and io_uring, explore how Rust async runtimes can integrate with io_uring through the Minato WebSocket server project, and discuss why io_uring matters not only for networking but also for file I/O and database systems such as PostgreSQL.

The session focuses on practical system software design, runtime architecture, and the future direction of Linux asynchronous I/O.