Linux 2.6.24 and I/O schedulers

Submitted by sbrbot
on October 9, 2008 - 10:18pm

I have a dual core notebook with one SATA HDD (7200rpm) used primarily as desktop machine where CFQ sheduler is defined as default I/O scheduler for my HDD. I do have LAME on it but only for development purposes.

My question; is it important at all which I/O scheduler is used on such a machine or it does matter only when big database or service like web/ftp/p2p runs on machine? I know that scheduler is defined and used per device basis. But is it changing dynamically for one device according to some I/O statistics?

I'm recompiling my linux kernel to optimize it for my machine and in kernel configuration three are I/O schedulers; Anticipatory, Deadline, CFQ where CFQ is defined as default. Since I have only one disk and use only CFQ for it, do I need to include into kernel configuration and recompile other two schedulers at all?