did read somewhere that it may has to do something with the virtio driver i'm using.
added a scsi0 device and retested:
fio --rw=write --name=test --size=20M --direct=1
test: (g=0): rw=write, bs=(R) 4096B-4096B, (W) 4096B-4096B, (T) 4096B-4096B, ioengine=psync, iodepth=1
fio-3.12
Starting 1...