Linux 3.16: Deadline I/O Scheduler Generally Leads With A SSD

There's been numerous requests lately for more disk I/O scheduler benchmarks on Phoronix of the Linux kernel and its various scheduler options. Given that there's routinely just speculation and miscommunication by individuals over the best scheduler for HDDs/SSDs, here's some fresh benchmarks for reference using the Linux 3.16 kernel.

This early Linux 3.16 testing was just some simple and straight-forward tests I got done with a spare system I maintained access to while in Russia. Once returning to the US this week and then settling into the new Phoronix office I'll run some more Linux 3.16 benchmarks using the latest Git snapshot at the time and use both hard drives and solid-state drives.

The Linux system for this article was the Intel Core i7 4790K Devil's Canyon rig with a Crucial 128GB MX100 SSD. The Linux 3.16 Git snapshot from post-RC2 was used for testing. The SSD was formatted to EXT4 and using its stock mount options. The I/O schedulers tested were the mainline choices offered by the kernel: Deadline, Noop, and CFQ. This Ubuntu mainline kernel build was defaulting to Deadline.

All of this I/O scheduler kernel benchmarking was done in a fully-reproducible and straightforward manner using the Phoronix Test Suite.