Thursday, August 21, 2008

Linux disk scheduler fixes

Thanks to Google we will now have better performance on disks when using the latest linux kernels. Google sponsored for six months development and research at Gelato@UNSW who did benchmarking and created fixes for the following schedulers: noop, deadline, anticipatory and for “Complete Fair Queuing (CFQ)”. Also they created two new schedulers

- IOScheduling/VRscheduler: an implementation of the V(R) scheduling algorithm;
- IOScheduling/FIFOscheduler: a pure FCFS scheduler.

A disk scheduler is the part of the Linux kernel that reorders, delays, and merges requests for disk I/O to achieve better throughput and lower latency than would happen if all the requests were sent straight to disk. The scheduler aims to minimize disk head movement as far as possible. You can think of the scheduler as a queue of requests waiting for service at the disk.

If you like to check the latest kernel go to kernel.org

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