Latest / Big Iron Radio / Homelab Brief - Linux I/O Schedulers for HDD, SSD, and NVMe
Transcript
- 0:02Welcome to the Homelab Brief from Big Iron.
- 0:06Today, picking the right Linux, a slash O scheduler for your drives.
- 0:11Quick note, this is an AI voice drawn from a Big Iron guide.
- 0:16Links below.
- 0:17Linux in 2026 has four real A slash O schedulers.
- 0:22None, MQ Deadline, Kyber, and BFQ.
- 0:25The old single Q1's CFQ and Noop are gone,
- 0:28so any advice that still mentions them is stale.
- 0:32The whole game is matching the scheduler to the media.
- 0:36For NVMe, use none.
- 0:39The drive's own controller manages its queues better than the kernel can,
- 0:43so the fastest thing the kernel can do is get out of the way.
- 0:47Treat that one as mandatory.
- 0:49For spinning disks in SATA or SAS SSDs, MQ Deadline.
- 0:54It's read-prioritized with a write deadline,
- 0:57so nothing starves the safe, boring default that just works.
- 1:02Then the two specialists.
- 1:04BFQ is tuned for desktop interactive feel-lovely on a laptop,
- 1:08but its CPU overhead is catastrophic on a busy server,
- 1:12so keep it off your lab boxes.
- 1:15And Kyber is a niche pick only
- 1:16when you're chasing specific P99 latency targets.
- 1:20Most people never need either.
- 1:22To make your choice stick, drop a UDEV rule in etc. slash UDEV slash rules,
- 1:28D slash 60IA schedulers, rules,
- 1:31and reload with UDEV Atom, otherwise it resets on reboot.
- 1:35And if you run ZFS, don't even think about it.
- 1:38ZFS auto-sets none on its pool members already.
- 1:42The full rule templates in the guide.
- 1:43That's your brief.