As mentioned above, MPIO drivers often group information about all of the paths between a host device and a storage array 105 for a given logical volume into a logical device, also known as a multipath device. Multipath devices are utilized by the MPIO drivers of the host device to distribute IO operations across all of the available paths to a given logical volume. An application 212 and kernel space filesystem 222 typically utilize kernel space-based IO load balancing and submission functionality 224 to distribute the IO operations across the paths associated with the given logical volume in the corresponding the multipath device. For example, the application 212 and filesystem 222 typically rely on the use of IO stacks, interrupts, lock contentions and other kernel space-based functionality residing in the kernel space for implementing the IO load balancing and submission functionality 224.

For example, as seen on the left side of FIG. 2, an application 212 residing in the user space 210 interfaces with IO load balancing and submission functionality 224 residing in the kernel space 220, either directly or via a kernel space-based filesystem 222 such as, e.g., an ext4 filesystem, an xfs filesystem, a btrfs filesystem or other similar kernel-based filesystems, to submit IO operations to the storage array 105 via an HBA 232 residing in the hardware space 230. The IO load balancing and submission functionality 224 is used in conjunction with an HBA driver 226 to submit the IO operations from host device 102 to the storage array 105 via the corresponding HBA 232 of a given path selected by the IO load balancing and submission functionality 224.