Adrian Bunk posted a patch to make Linux IO schedulers a non-modular option, which would require one IO scheduler to be selected at compile time. He suggested, "there isn't any big advantage and doesn't seem to be much usage of modular schedulers." He added that removing the option to make IO schedulers modular would save 2kB on each kernel image. Jens Axboe did not like the patch, "big nack, I use it all the time for testing. Just because you don't happen to use it is not a reason to remove it." When Adrian noted that no distros seemed to be making IO schedulers available as modules, Jens suggested that this was a mistake and quipped, "it's been a long time since I considered a distro .config a benchmark/guideline of any sort."

Adrian went on to ask for the technical reasons for continuing to support four different IO schedulers, expressing concern that it could lead to bugs in individual schedulers going unreported. Jens explained that he was aiming for the perfect IO scheduler, but at this time different IO schedulers offer better results for different workloads, "with some hard work and testing, we should be able to get rid of [the anticipatory scheduler]. It still beats cfq for some of the workloads that deadline is good at, so not quite yet." Arjan van de Ven offered, "there is at least one technical reason to need more than one: certain types of storage (both big EMC boxes as well as solid state disks) don't behave like disks and have no seek penalty; any cpu time spent on avoiding seeks is wasted on those, so for these devices one really wants to use a different IO scheduler, one which is much lighter weight". Jens then acknowledged, "there's always a risk with 'duplication', like several drivers for the same hardware. I'm not disputing that."

"Completely fair scheduling is [a] really good thing, but if you want the best performance for certain applications you need to tune up some things," explained Michal Piotrowski in his announcement for the fifth version of his DeskOpt daemon. The daemon is a Python script that helps to automatically tune the I/O scheduler and the process scheduler to offer better performance for certain applications such as games or audio applications. The script supports the default CFS process scheduler and CFQ I/O scheduler, as well as the anticipatory I/O scheduler and the deadline I/O scheduler.

The small script utilizes an XML configuration file, deskopt.conf, used to define scheduler classes each supporting their own scheduler tunings. One or more applications can then be added to each scheduler class, and when any of the specified applications starts the daemon will automatically tune the schedulers per the settings in that scheduler class. As examples in the provided sample configuration file Michal defines a "games" scheduler class defining two games receiving the highest scheduler priority and an "audio" scheduler class receiving not quite as high of a scheduler priority.

Anyone who's been following Linux kernel development for the past several months has heard about one exciting feature after another being merged into the still un-released 2.6 kernel. New features that noticeably affect user experience include Robert Love's [interview] preemptible kernel work [story], Ingo Molnar's [interview] O(1) Scheduler [story], Rik Van Riel's [interview] reverse mapping VM [story], Nick Piggins' [interview] Anticipatory I/O scheduler [story], and much, much more...

Having some spare time a few nights ago, I decided to give the latest kernel, 2.6.0-test4, a trial run on my aging 550Mhz PIII desktop computer, and the result was nothing short of spectacular. As the final 2.6.0 release approaches, it is important that an increasing number of users (aka testers) give this kernel a try, especially as currently it's still a sexy task for developers to track down kernel bugs and stabalize their work. Once work starts on the 2.7 development tree, inevitably much talent will again be focusing on new features.

The purpose of this document is to provide some helpful tips to readers that currently compile their own 2.4 kernels, but haven't yet made the leap to 2.6. This is still a development kernel, so you may run into problems, but overall stability and performance is quite impressive and I can't recommend enough that you try it today.

Nick Piggin, a college student living in Canberra Australia, has been working on an anticipatory I/O scheduler for the Linux kernel [story].

When a process reads data from a disk, the default "deadline" I/O scheduler can offer poor performance if a streamed write is happening at the same time. The reason is that many read operations require multiple reads, each reporting a result back before the next can be scheduled. Thus, each of these reads has to wait behind a queue of writes, resulting in the aforementioned performance problem. The anticipatory scheduler solves this problem nicely by pausing for a few milliseconds after each read, "anticipating" the next read request [story].

In this interview, Nick offers much more detail behind the operation of the anticipatory scheduler. His goal is to stablize and tune [story] the new scheduler, aiming utimately for inclusion into the 2.5 development kernel tree as the default Linux I/O scheduler [story]. The latest version of Nick's anticipatory scheduler can be found here in Andrew Morton's [interview] -mm kernel branch.