 A scalable multi-queue block layer for the Linux kernel was developed by Fusion-io engineers Axboe and Shaohua Li, and merged into the Linux kernel mainline in kernel version 3.13, released on January 19, 2014.This new block layer uses parallelism (and thus provides much higher performance) offered by SSDs using NVM Express.With the release of Linux kernel version 3.13, only the virtioblk driver has been modified to actually use this new interface.