Building Your Own Linux Kernel: Tricky kernel options (part 3)

"Block Layer: IO Schedulers

"Under "Enable the block layer" lies an option you probably wouldn't think to look at: "IO Schedulers". That's obviously some kind of übergeeky option that only a kernel developer would care about, right?

"Well, mostly true. But if you're on a netbook, there's a hidden option you should know about: the No-op scheduler.

"IO schedulers manage disk reads and writes to try to reduce the number of times the disk head has to move. But with a solid-state drive, there's no disk head, and all this smart scheduling can actually hurt performance.

"Under IO Schedulers --> Default I/O scheduler, you'll see an option for the "No-op" scheduler (Figure 1). If your main disk is solid-state, try it. You may see an improvement."

Complete Story

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