Ok, I've built the latest BFS from git tree, with both deadline and anticipatory enabled as modules within the config. Everything runs as smoothly as before, with no added overhead. To enable either one of them, you have to echo deadline or anticipatory to /sys/block/mmcblk0/queue/scheduler - this seems to automagically insert the corresponding module (probably best to rmmod if you then change back to noop or cfq at a later date, though, as they stay loaded). I did find a thread regarding anticipatory on Android and found this snippet to be quite interesting: ..which makes me think deadline might be the best scheduler to use, even though the N900's drive isn't exactly an SSD?