To choose IO schedulers at boot time, use the argument 'elevator=deadline'. 'noop' and 'cfq' (the default) are also available. IO schedulers are assigned globally at boot time only presently. Each io queue has a set of io scheduler tunables associated with it. These tunables control how the io scheduler works. You can find these entries in: /sys/block/<device>/queue/iosched assuming that you have sysfs mounted on /sys. If you don't have sysfs mounted, you can do so by typing: # mount none /sys -t sysfs As of the Linux 2.6.10 kernel, it is now possible to change the IO scheduler for a given block device on the fly (thus making it possible, for instance, to set the CFQ scheduler for the system default, but set a specific device to use the deadline or noop schedulers - which can improve that device's throughput). To set a specific scheduler, simply do this: echo SCHEDNAME > /sys/block/DEV/queue/scheduler where SCHEDNAME is the name of a defined IO scheduler, and DEV is the device name (hda, hdb, sga, or whatever you happen to have). The list of defined schedulers can be found by simply doing a "cat /sys/block/DEV/queue/scheduler" - the list of valid names will be displayed, with the currently selected scheduler in brackets: # cat /sys/block/hda/queue/scheduler noop deadline [cfq] # echo deadline > /sys/block/hda/queue/scheduler # cat /sys/block/hda/queue/scheduler noop [deadline] cfq