For io_uring all the reads go through io_uring and generally don't send back a result until some data is ready. So you'll receive a single stream of syscall results in which the results for all fds are interleaved, and you won't even be able to write code that has one task doing I/O starving other tasks. For epoll, polling the epoll instance is how you get notified of the readiness for all the other fds too. But the important thing isn't to poll the socket that you know is ready, it's to yield to runtime at all, so that other tasks can be resumed. Amusingly upon reading the rest of the blog post I discovered that this is exactly what tokio does. It just always yields after a certain number of operations that could yield. It doesn't implement preemption.