Endless OS Switching To The BFQ I/O Scheduler For More Responsive Linux Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Endless OS Switching To The BFQ I/O Scheduler For More Responsive Linux Desktop

While Con Kolivas' kernel patch series decided to do away with BFQ support, the GNOME-aligned Endless OS Linux distribution has decided to do the opposite in move from CFQ as the default I/O scheduler over to BFQ...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Endless-OS-Goes-BFQ

[enihcam]

Both of BFQ and Kyber committed changes of great latency improvements in 4.20-rc2. For example:

BFQ:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?h=v4.20-rc2&id=2d29c9f89fcd9bf408fcdaaf515c90a169f22ecd

Kyber:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?h=v4.20-rc2&id=6e25cb01ea206362616a2be469d4f3635f58ca63

Looking forward to the benchmarks!

[RussianNeuroMancer]

For what task/use-case Kyber is optimized for?

[cl333r]

Is there any Kyber or BFQ ppa so I can install it easily? Currently there's no BFQ in Ubuntu 18.10.

[M@GOid]

That LibreOffice launch time is really impressive. I wonder what is the effect of this scheduler on other desktop apps and games.

[cl333r]

From the article:

It's been on my TODO list for a while to run some fresh I/O scheduler benchmarks with the latest kernel

I think you're benchmarking speed while I/O schedulers for us are all about responsiveness. Yesterday when I was doing a file copy operation in the background the youtube videos in Firefox almost stopped playing (Core i5 - 4 cores, 6GB memory, GT 1030 2GB, 2TB HDD) - that's pathetic for a desktop OS! I don't expect BFQ to give me *speed*, in fact I expect it to slow things down a bit but it's a great tradeoff.

[Vistaus]

For what task/use-case Kyber is optimized for?

Dunno exactly, but it makes my laptop fly.

[Jumbotron]

Curious...how does one change the default scheduler from one to another such as BFQ. So for instance using Ubuntu 18.04 I'm assuming it's CFQ. Hiw do you get BFQ and how do you install it and make it default?

[M@yeulC]

The situation right now for me is unbearable. If a process eats up a lot of background I/O, everything slows down. I was in a multiplayer game today, and suddenly everything came so a grinding halt until I Sysrq+K(illed) my whole tty. I couldn't even ssh in. I suspect it was doo to baloo, which has been eating up my resource usage lately.

I'm running my system that has otherwise powerful HW off a 5400 RPM HDD. I wonder if the kernel couldn't limit the amount of data a given app can feed into the in-memory disk cache, as those cache misses seem to be the primary factor behind irresponsivity.

[skeevy420]

The situation right now for me is unbearable. If a process eats up a lot of background I/O, everything slows down. I was in a multiplayer game today, and suddenly everything came so a grinding halt until I Sysrq+K(illed) my whole tty. I couldn't even ssh in. I suspect it was doo to baloo, which has been eating up my resource usage lately.

I'm running my system that has otherwise powerful HW off a 5400 RPM HDD. I wonder if the kernel couldn't limit the amount of data a given app can feed into the in-memory disk cache, as those cache misses seem to be the primary factor behind irresponsivity.

I did a full rebuild of my Baloo index a few days ago and my system was unresponsive as hell at random times until it finished; using a 7200 RPM myself so I get it. Once it finally finished it has ran pretty good and hasn't bothered me for the most part. When it does bother me is when I'm using a program that has cache in $HOME or if I'm doing git pulls, extracting files, and stuff like that and it decides to start indexing on me at a bad time.

If you can figure out where or what is causing Baloo to do unnecessary indexing, you can go to System Settings>File Search & add that to the do not scan list. $HOME/.cache and $HOME/.waterfox help me.