This guide explains the concept of Linux loop devices, shows how to create and mount a file as a virtual block device using both the simple mount -o loop method and the explicit losetup approach, and dives into the kernel implementation and typical use cases.
LiteIO is an open‑source, cloud‑native block device service that leverages NVMe‑oF and SPDK to provide high‑performance, scalable storage for Kubernetes‑based workloads, improving storage utilization and enabling FinOps‑driven cost efficiency across large‑scale production environments.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of Intel's open‑source SPDK, explaining its user‑space driver model, polling I/O, core components, integration with Ceph, architecture layers, compilation steps, code examples, and design considerations for building high‑performance storage and file‑system solutions.
This guide explains how to benchmark a Ceph storage cluster before production by measuring hardware baselines, disk read/write performance, network throughput, and using Ceph's built‑in tools like rados bench, load‑gen, rbd bench‑write, and fio for comprehensive performance testing.
The guide explains Linux’s unified VFS architecture, detailing how inodes and dentries map files to disk regions, describes superblock and data block layout, outlines ZFS’s pool, copy‑on‑write and ARC caching, covers block device types, I/O scheduling queues, and key performance metrics.
The Linux loop device creates a virtual block device from a regular file, allowing the file’s filesystem to be mounted like a real disk; using losetup or ioctl you can attach, configure (including encryption or direct I/O), and the kernel forwards I/O through a concise, high‑performance stack ensuring compatibility and extensibility.
This article explains how to achieve storage tiering on Linux hosts by virtualizing fast SSDs and slower HDDs into a single device, detailing two approaches—kernel block‑device drivers and LVM‑based solutions—along with their implementation steps, open‑source projects, and trade‑offs.
