Selecting a Linux I/O Scheduler

Question

I read that it's supposedly possible to change the I/O scheduler for a particular device on a running kernel by writing to /sys/block/[disk]/queue/scheduler. For example I can see on my system:

anon@anon:~$ cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler 
noop anticipatory deadline [cfq] 

that the default is the completely fair queuing scheduler. What I'm wondering is if there is any use in including all four schedulers in my custom kernel. It would seem that there's not much point in having more than one scheduler compiled in unless the kernel is smart enough to select the correct scheduler for the correct hardware, specifically the 'noop' scheduler for flash based drives and one of the others for a traditional hard drive.

Is this the case?

Answer 1

As documented in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/block/switching-sched.txt, the I/O scheduler on any particular block device can be changed at runtime. There may be some latency as the previous scheduler's requests are all flushed before bringing the new scheduler into use, but it can be changed without problems even while the device is under heavy use.

# cat /sys/block/hda/queue/scheduler
noop deadline [cfq]
# echo anticipatory > /sys/block/hda/queue/scheduler
# cat /sys/block/hda/queue/scheduler
noop [deadline] cfq

Ideally, there would be a single scheduler to satisfy all needs. It doesn't seem to exist yet. The kernel often doesn't have enough knowledge to choose the best scheduler for your workload:

• noop is often the best choice for memory-backed block devices (e.g. ramdisks) and other non-rotational media (flash) where trying to reschedule I/O is a waste of resources
• deadline is a lightweight scheduler which tries to put a hard limit on latency
• cfq tries to maintain system-wide fairness of I/O bandwidth

The default was anticipatory for a long time, and it received a lot of tuning, but was removed in 2.6.33 (early 2010). cfq became the default some while ago, as its performance is reasonable and fairness is a good goal for multi-user systems (and even single-user desktops). For some scenarios -- databases are often used as examples, as they tend to already have their own peculiar scheduling and access patterns, and are often the most important service (so who cares about fairness?) -- anticipatory has a long history of being tunable for best performance on these workloads, and deadline very quickly passes all requests through to the underlying device.