Linux 4.16 To Feature More BFQ Optimizations

For fans of the BFQ I/O scheduler, more improvements for it are coming with Linux 4.16.

Linaro's Paolo Valente had his latest feature updates for the Budget Fair Queueing (BFQ) I/O scheduler pulled in to the block subsystem's "-next" tree, a few weeks ahead of the Linux 4.16 merge window.

In digging through the commits, among the interesting changes:

block, bfq: let a queue be merged only shortly after starting I/O - This should yield a 3~4% throughput boost depending on the processor.

block, bfq: increase threshold to deem I/O as random - Better throughput for some workloads.

block, bfq: consider also past I/O in soft real-time detection - Should help in select cases like LibreOffice start-up time on some systems.

And there are various other improvements and optimizations to find with the block code for the upcoming Linux 4.16.