Let's ignore BFS because my motivator for using a -ck kernel is the availability of BFQ. I mean, I didn't claim it's generally about knowing the right people,

Let's ignore BFS because my motivator for using a -ck kernel is the availability of BFQ. I mean, I didn't claim it's generally about knowing the right people, but some occasions, like the one mentioned above, do not leave much room for interpretation. BFQ in particular has been discussed years ago on LKML, and while the general design of it was deemed beneficial, the consensus from the kernel maintainers had been to refactor CFQ and turn it into BFQ. Given the pluggability of I/O schedulers, and already having at least three bundled schedulers, this makes no sense and is hard to explain to users of the kernel. Now years have passed and neither did CFQ evolve in the discussed way nor did BFQ enter torvalds tree. The argument I'm making is that in the meantime many unfinished and experimental bits landed in mainline. If I were the maintainer of a patch like BFQ, I might possibly take the effort to a more inclusive kernel, and integrate and refine it there after it's mainlined.