How to add an I/O Scheduler to your kernel:
Praise God, another succesful addition to the TBLTE kernel was that of adding the FIOPS I/O scheduler to the kernel. What is an I/O scheduler? Well it is the part of the kernel that handles, or schedules, input and output. Particularly, this has to do with writing and reading to and from media, like your hard drive, flash drive, etc.
So, how do we do that? How do we add I/O schedulers to our kernel?
Well, for the TBLTE kernel, I will show you what I did, and you can add to your kernel similarly.
Go to the block folder in your kernel source. The first thing that you need to do is add the fiops-iosched.c file. Whatever I/O scheduler you want to add will be named like this: {NAME-iosched.c} you can search Google or github for them, or take them from my source if you would like.
Once you put your fiops-iosched.c file in your kernel’s ./block/ folder, you can now edit two other files in that folder. You need to add the new scheduler to the make file, so it knows to make it, you can do that like so:
Open ./block/Makefile and add this line after the other *-iosched.o lines:
[CODE]
obj-$(CONFIG_IOSCHED_FIOPS) += fiops-iosched.o
[/CODE]
Notice that it just uses the name of the iosched file, but with an “.o” extension instead of a “.c” extension. The “.c” file you added earlier will create a “.o” (object) file that the Kernel needs to use to “make” the kernel.
Now edit the ./block/Kconfig.iosched file like so:
[CODE]
config IOSCHED_FIOPS
tristate “FIOPS I/O scheduler”
default y
—help—
The FIOPS I/O scheduler. WJH.
[/CODE]
This way, when you are moddifying your configuration, you can select to build it. Notice that it is a “default y”, essentially, I am telling the config file creator to allways assume I want to build this, unless I choose not to. You can also eddit the “—help—” portion to say anything you want. I put my initials in there so I can find it easily with the search tool.
Now open your configuration file. For the stock builds, that would be ./arch/arm/configs/ap88084_sec_defconfig, and add this line:
[CODE]
CONFIG_IOSCHED_FIOPS=y
[/CODE]
Note that you could also do this through
[CODE]$ make menuconfig [/CODE]
.
You may also note, since we gave it a “default y” in the Kconfig.iosched file, we don’t actually need to add this to our configs, as it will be built by default, but I like to declare what I am building in my configs so I remember what I am doing.
There you go! Now when you build your kernel again, the FIOPS I/O scheduler will be added in. It is remarkably simple, just the way I like it. You can read the commit here: [url]https://github.com/alaskalinuxuser/kernel_samsung_tblte/commit/f80320a895612bd1379ca789f88f1d6dfd6e68f9[/url]
Linux – keep it simple.