NBD doesn't work well with CFQ (or AS) schedulers, so let's default to something else. The two problems I have experienced with nbd and cfq are: 1) nbd hangs with cfq on RHEL 5 (2.6.18) -- this may well have been fixed There's a similar debian bug that has been filed as well: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=447638 2) nbd performs about 10% better (the last time I tested) with deadline vs. cfq (the overhead of cfq doesn't provide much advantage to nbd [not being a real disk], and you end up going through the I/O scheduler on the nbd server anyway, so it makes sense that deadline is better with nbd) There have been posts to nbd-general mailing list about problems with cfq and nbd also. Signed-Off-By: Paul Clements --- ./drivers/block/nbd.c.max_nbd_killed 2008-02-07 16:46:24.000000000 -0500 +++ ./drivers/block/nbd.c 2008-02-08 16:13:01.000000000 -0500 @@ -667,6 +667,12 @@ static int __init nbd_init(void) put_disk(disk); goto out; } + if (elevator_init(disk->queue, "deadline") != 0) { + if (elevator_init(disk->queue, "noop") != 0) { + put_disk(disk); + goto out; + } + } } if (register_blkdev(NBD_MAJOR, "nbd")) {