Abstract: With the rise of AI and data-intensive applications, the storage stack has become a critical component for performance. At the same time, new storage hardware devices, such as near-storage accelerators, are emerging. However, the storage stack has struggled to keep pace, leading to significant performance bottlenecks. This talk focuses on our works on how to evolve the modern storage stack through three key pieces: I/O abstraction, caching, and prefetching. First, we introduce a new I/O abstraction to reduce dominant I/O overheads and efficiently utilize near-storage computing capabilities. Next, we present a novel caching management solution that spans host and storage devices, optimizing memory resources. Finally, we present a cross-layered (user-level runtime and OS) prefetching mechanism for optimal performance.