System Architecture Diagram Illustration

This diagram provides a detailed architectural overview of how Linux handles storage I/O. It illustrates the journey of data requests from user applications, through the Virtual File System (VFS) and various file system types, down to the Block I/O Layer. The diagram highlights key components like I/O schedulers (cfq, deadline, noop) and various device mappers (mdraid, dm-multipath). It meticulously details the SCSI subsystem, showing its upper, mid, and low layers, and various transport classes and device drivers interacting with different physical storage devices such as HDDs, SSDs, RAID controllers, and NVMe drives. The flow also indicates options for direct I/O and interaction with the page cache.

linux - kernel - architecture - storage - io - filesystem - scsi - driver