SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Javier Gonzalez
Principal Software Engineer
Samsung Electronics
I lead Samsung Memory Solutions open-source activities and manage a distributed team of highly talented engineers. This includes defining strategy, internal / external communication, and day-to-day execution. I am also the founder and site manager for Samsung Semiconductor Denmark Research (SSDR) - Samsung’s Memory Solutions first R&D center in Europe and fifth worldwide. I am a Ph.D in operating systems with a strong background in technical leadership, experimental research, and Linux Kernel development. My interests lay primarily in the hardware / software co-design space, where systems software, hardware architecture, and open-source meet. I am dedicated to defining safe environments for motivated software engineers to be creative and get things done. I am a contributor to a wide range of open-source projects including the Linux Kernel. I am a regular speaker at several top industry and academic conferences. Specialties: Compassionate Leadership, Systems Software Development, Linux Kernel, NVMe, Hyperscale / Data Center / Enterprise Storage, Open-Channel SSDs, Zoned Namespaces (ZNS), SSD Architecture, Software Defined Storage, Computational Storage.
Related Sessions
Enabling Asynchronous I/O Passthru in NVMe-Native Applications
Storage interfaces have evolved more in the past 3 years than in the previous 20 years. In Linux, we see this happening at two different layers: (i) the user- / kernel-space I/O interface, where io_uring is bringing a low-weight, scalable I/O path; and (ii) and the host/device protocol interface, where key-values and zoned block devices are starting to emerge. Applications that want to leverage these new interfaces have to at least change their storage backends. This presents a challenge for early technology adopters, as the mature part of the Linux I/O stack (i.e., the block layer I/O path) might not implement all the needed functionality. While alternatives such as SDPK tend to be available more rapidly, the in-kernel I/O path presents a limitation. In this talk, we will present how we are enabling an asynchronous I/O path for applications to use NVMe devices in passthru mode. We will speak to the upstream efforts to make this path available in Linux. More specifically, we will (i) detail the changes in the mainline Linux kernel, and (ii) we will show how we are using xNVMe to enable this new I/O path transparently to applications. In the process, we will provide a performance evaluation to discuss the trade-offs between the different I/O paths in Linux, including block I/O io_uring, passthru io_uring, and SPDK.
