Tag: scheduler

For one of my Raspberry Pi, I am maintaining myself my own kernel. By that I mean that I’m using the kernel repository from the Raspberry Pi Foundation but I am defining the configuration of the kernel myself. My goal is to make the kernel low latency, hardened and with specific drivers compiled instead of given as modules.

Recently I upgrade it to kernel version 5.0.0-rc8 and now to 5.0.0. At first I thought there was an error in the RC8 because I did not see the CFQ (Complete Fair Queue) or Deadline I/O schedulers (block layer I/O schedulers). But when the stable version was out, there was no longer a doubt, either they had been moved to a new section or removed. The new default scheduler was the mq-deadline Multi-Queue Block scheduler and there are two other alternatives as module: BFQ (Budget Fair Queueing) and Kyber.

Linux kernel 5.0+ is defaulting to blk-mq

I then discovered that Linux kernel 5.0.0 has dropped support for the legacy block schedulers and now only support the multi-queue block (blk mq) schedulers. That is a very interesting move, the multi-queue schedulers should provide better scalability so performances by using parallelism in hardware. On the desktop or a Raspberry Pi, I do not expect to see any improvements, but for servers there could be a win.

Sources:

• Linux Kernel Newbies – Changelog Kernel 5.0 – Block I/O
• One of the Linux kernel commits