[XPERIA X10 General] chiefy009:
NOOP scheduler

The NOOP scheduler inserts all incoming I/O requests into a simple, unordered

FIFO queue and implements request merging.

The scheduler assumes I/O performance optimization will be handled at some

other layer of the I/O hierarchy; e.g., at the block device; by an intelligent

HBA such as a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) RAID controller or by an externally

attached controller such as a storage subsystem accessed through a

switched Storage Area Network).

NOOP scheduler is best used with solid state devices such as flash memory

or in general with devices that do not depend on mechanical movement to

access data (meaning typical "hard disk" drive technology consisting of seek

time primarily, plus rotational latency). Such non-mechanical devices do not

require re-ordering of multiple I/O requests, a technique that groups together

I/O requests that are physically close together on the disk, thereby reducing

average seek time and the variability of I/O service time.

Deadline

The goal of the Deadline scheduler is to attempt to guarantee a start service time for a request[1]. It does that by imposing a deadline on all I/O operations to prevent starvation of requests. It also maintains two deadline queues, in addition to the sorted queues (both read and write). Deadline queues are basically sorted by their deadline (the expiration time), while the sorted queues are sorted by the sector number.

Before serving the next request, the Deadline scheduler decides which queue to use. Read queues are given a higher priority, because processes usually block on read operations. Next, the Deadline scheduler checks if the first request in the deadline queue has expired. Otherwise, the scheduler serves a batch of requests from the sorted queue. In both cases, the scheduler also serves a batch of requests following the chosen request in the sorted queue.

By default, read requests have an expiration time of 500 ms, write requests expire in 5 seconds.

Anticipatory

Anticipatory scheduling is an algorithm for scheduling hard disk input/output. It seeks to increase the efficiency of disk utilization by "anticipating" synchronous read operations.

"Deceptive idleness" is a situation where a process appears to be finished reading from the disk when it is actually processing data in preparation of the next read operation. This will cause a normal work-conserving I/O scheduler to switch to servicing I/O from an unrelated process. This situation is detrimental to the throughput of synchronous reads, as it degenerates into a seeking workload.[1] Anticipatory scheduling overcomes deceptive idleness by pausing for a short time (a few milliseconds) after a read operation in anticipation of another close-by read requests.[2]

Anticipatory scheduling yields significant improvements in disk utilization for some workloads.[3] In some situations the Apache web server may achieve up to 71% more throughput from using anticipatory scheduling.[4]

The Linux anticipatory scheduler may reduce performance on disks using TCQ, high performance disks, and hardware RAID arrays.[5] An anticipatory scheduler (AS) was the default Linux kernel scheduler between 2.6.0 and 2.6.18, by which time it was replaced by the CFQ scheduler.

BFQ

The Brain **** Scheduler (or BFS) is a task scheduler designed for the Linux kernel in August of 2009 as an alternative to the Completely Fair Scheduler and the O(1) scheduler.[2] BFS was created by veteran kernel programmer Con Kolivas[3].

The objective of BFS, compared to other schedulers, was to provide a scheduler with a simpler algorithm, that did not require adjustment of heuristics or tuning parameters to tailor performance to a specific type of computation workload. The BFS author asserted that these tunable parameters were difficult for the average user to understand, especially in terms of interactions of multiple parameters with each other, and claimed that the use of such tuning parameters could often result in improved performance in a specific targeted type of computation, at the cost of worse performance in the general case.[4] BFS has been reported to improve responsiveness on light-NUMA (non-uniform memory access) Linux mobile devices and desktop computers with fewer than 16 cores.

CFQ

CFQ, also known as "Completely Fair Queuing", is an I/O scheduler for the Linux kernel which was written in 2003 by Jens Axboe.

CFQ works by placing synchronous requests submitted by processes into a number of per-process queues and then allocating timeslices for each of the queues to access the disk. The length of the time slice and the number of requests a queue is allowed to submit depends on the IO priority of the given process. Asynchronous requests for all processes are batched together in fewer queues, one per priority. While CFQ does not do explicit anticipatory IO scheduling, it achieves the same effect of having good aggregate throughput for the system as a whole, by allowing a process queue to idle at the end of synchronous IO thereby "anticipating" further close IO from that process. It can be considered a natural extension of granting IO time slices to a process.

Over the next few days I will test and report back