How do I change to the noop scheduler?

I have an SSD in my laptop and I've been told that switching to the "noop" scheduler is preferred.

How do I change to the noop scheduler, and where do I make the change so that it is persistent across reboots?


Suppose your hard disk is /dev/sda. Then you could check to see what scheduler is currently in use for it:

cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

(The scheduler currently in use will be surrounded by [ ] brackets.)

And you could make it use the noop scheduler:

echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

See this article for slightly more information.

To make the change persist, you can put the command in /etc/rc.local.


Edit /etc/default/grub, such as gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub, here you need to add elevator=noop.

Change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash elevator=noop".

Then run sudo update-grub2 and restart.


This Debian reference shows how to dynamically detect SSDs and change the scheduler accordingly:

In systems with different drive types you can adjust settings with a udev rule (create /etc/udev/rules.d/60-ssd-scheduler.rules):

# Set deadline scheduler for non-rotating disks

 ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="0",ATTR{queue/scheduler}="deadline"

To make sure that your kernel can detect rotational status:

$ for f in /sys/block/sd?/queue/rotational; do printf "$f is "; cat $f; done
/sys/block/sda/queue/rotational is 1
/sys/block/sdb/queue/rotational is 1
/sys/block/sdc/queue/rotational is 0   <=== Only this is SSD!

All of the above is quoted directly from the Debian reference, which has many other elements of interest to first-time SSD users.