I have a public release announcement ready for the staircase scheduler and have put it online with a current stable usable version of it here: staircase scheduler.
I am lucky enough to be going away for an extended holiday next week but unfortunately this means it would be unwise to post this to lkml since I will be unable to respond to reports in any meaningful way.
I have run out of time to do any more coding till coming back at the end of May. This also means I will not be updating the -ck patchset either sorry.
In the meantime, feel free to use the staircase scheduler and send reports. I'll be able to check my email intermittently.
I am extremely happy with it's performance so far. There is only one known minor bug/problem with it at the moment and you have to know how to reproduce it. My task for those testers out there is to see if they can find it ;-)
Change of plan
I changed my mind. I figure it's probably better to get it out marked "experimental" so people know it exists and let them test it. So I posted it to lkml.
How to activate staircase scheduler?
Hi,
i patched my sources with the staircase scheduler. Before i used the cfq scheduler from the 2.6.4-ck1 patchset. But which parameter should i give my kernel at boottime? For the cfq scheduler i used (lilo) append="elevator=cfq". elevator=staircase staircase1 staircase2 just loads the normal scheduler...i read something about deadline...so should i use append="elevator=deadline"? Or does the patch apply staircase as default scheduler?
Process scheduler
You're thinking of the i/o scheduler. Mine is a rewrite of the process scheduler. There is no "pluggable" design for the process scheduler so once you patch this in it is working and it is the only scheduler available to you.