The linked PDF does a very good job answering that and thankfully the first couple paragraphs should give a good start to understanding how and what it solves.

The linked PDF does a very good job answering that and thankfully the first couple paragraphs should give a good start to understanding how and what it solves. The specific point to make is that while this can work with socket handles, it's primarily aimed to allow more efficient work with files (where AIO has failed to provide much benefit outside of batching operations with fewer syscalls). io_uring is also one of the first post-spectre/meltdown syscall designs to be merged into the Linux kernel. If the ring buffer style used in this API becomes a pattern or not will be interesting.