I applied some of my io_uring learnings to writing an implementation of ls(1) with the goal of minimizing syscalls. The repo is here, and I did a little writeup here. I was mostly interested in the syscall reduction I could get in a realistic program which relies very little on traditional IO (reads, writes, etc). Nearly all the IO for something like ls are syscalls: statx to be specific. I benchmarked syscalls and time of several popular options, syscall results are below.
| Program | n=10 | n=100 | n=1,000 | n=10,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| lsr -al | 20 | 28 | 105 | 848 |
| ls -al | 405 | 675 | 3,377 | 30,396 |
| eza -al | 319 | 411 | 1,320 | 10,364 |
| lsd -al | 508 | 1,408 | 10,423 | 100,512 |
| uutils ls -al | 445 | 986 | 6,397 | 10,005 |
and here’s a bonus screenshot! I added some fancy icons to be like the other big guys (eza and lsd):
