Hi Joakim,
Yes, looked at the code. And it's as I thought. If you add KIOMASTER=1 to the call to SETUP_IOSTREAM, that routine will essentially just limits I/O to only the MPI task specified by KIOMASTER. There is no code that will do any kind of MPI send to KIOMASTER unfortunately. That would need to be added, but I don't think it should go into the iostream_mix.F90 module. It's specific to the restarts so should reside with wrresf.F90 (or wrappers around them).
There was alot of discussion of this today at the EC-Earth meeting. Unfortunately the IO code in IFS is rather impenetratable. I am coming round to the idea of writing an external, separate code (but uses relevant code from OpenIFS) to read in the separate restarts and combine them after the run.
Cheers, Glenn