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Liquorix Kernel

liquorix.net

11–20 of 47 posts

Re: Liquorix Kernel

#11

> Liquorix is a distro kernel replacement built using the best configuration and kernel sources for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads. Hearing "the best" there really bugs me for some reason.

My eyes glazed over after reading that headline. It's about as useful as "We have the BEST coffee in town!" slogans.

Re: Liquorix Kernel

#12
post #4

If anyone has tried this on arch I'd love to hear your experience... I've got a home server sitting in my living room that looks bored.

Been using lqx kernels for many years now. On arch, I definitely get better gaming performance than the stock kernel. The liquorix repo's arch kernel doesn't play well with libvirt - that's about my only gripe. Xanmod kernel seems to have all the gaming improvements and still plays nice with libvirt though.

Is there any meaningful difference between the two, other than the libvirt compat?

Re: Liquorix Kernel

#13
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone found some when this was previously posted: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-g...

So, mostly slower than stock Linux 5.4.6? That's quite disappointing.

For the most part, Liquorix should always lose on throughput benchmarks. Most of Phoronix's benchmarks focus on those.

You can check the comments regarding a discovery that certain sched_yield configurations destroy performance on out-of-tree schedulers and was amended post benchmarking.

This however was using MuQSS, which was notorious for poor single thread performance. Liquorix now uses PDS which attempts to use all physical cores before deferring to SMT threads. This completely changes performance for lightly threaded workloads.

There's been no news-worthy benchmarks since Liquorix switched from MuQSS to PDS.

Re: Liquorix Kernel

#14
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone found some when this was previously posted: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-g...

So, mostly slower than stock Linux 5.4.6? That's quite disappointing.

Which is really weird. All the speedups they list seem like it would run faster in general.

Maybe the extra responsiveness under heavy loads is slowing it down?

Re: Liquorix Kernel

#15

> Liquorix is a distro kernel replacement built using the best configuration and kernel sources for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads. Hearing "the best" there really bugs me for some reason.

My eyes glazed over after reading that headline. It's about as useful as "We have the BEST coffee in town!" slogans.

I agree, I'll think of something more suitable to replace it. There's already good feedback in this thread I can work with.

Re: Liquorix Kernel

#16
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, mostly slower than stock Linux 5.4.6? That's quite disappointing.

Which is really weird. All the speedups they list seem like it would run faster in general. Maybe the extra responsiveness under heavy loads is slowing it down?

> Maybe the extra responsiveness under heavy loads is slowing it down?

Probably. It's a basic tradeoff in multitasking. A process can be left in cache and run for hundreds of milliseconds at high efficiency. Or the kernel can constantly juggle contexts in and out quickly, wasting cycles to reduce the delay between time slices and (potentially) allow fast response.

Re: Liquorix Kernel

#17
I've been using this on Debian 11 on an HP ML330 G6. It has dual xeons.

The main reason is that there is a bug in the normal Debian kernel that prevents that specific machine from booting with a kernel panic. The bug seems to be fixed in later kernel versions, hence Liquorix.

That machine also boots fine from a debian 10 kernel which is how I was able to install liquorix after the debian 11 upgrade went sideways.

Re: Liquorix Kernel

#18

> Liquorix is a distro kernel replacement built using the best configuration and kernel sources for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads. Hearing "the best" there really bugs me for some reason.

Why? It's well scoped: "the best ... for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads". The Linux kernel is buit for all sorts of devices, including embedded, servers, desktops, phones, etc - it's not hard to imagine the default settings being not perfectly optimized for a specific usecase (that said, I have not tried the lqx kernel or looked at benchmarks, but the claim doesn't seem outrageous).

Only speaking for me: because absolute superlatives like “the best” suggest some sort of measurement and methodology which isn’t shown, whereas “optimized for”/“purpose built for” usually has at least some demonstration of the claim attached.

Re: Liquorix Kernel

#19
Makes me think of WOLK, a popular kernel patchset back in the early 2000s. It didn't feel like a real kernel release until the WOLK patch was ready.

Re: Liquorix Kernel

#20
post #13
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, mostly slower than stock Linux 5.4.6? That's quite disappointing.

For the most part, Liquorix should always lose on throughput benchmarks. Most of Phoronix's benchmarks focus on those. You can check the comments regarding a discovery that certain sched_yield configurations destroy performance on out-of-tree schedulers and was amended post benchmarking. This however was using MuQSS, which was notorious for poor single thread performance. Liquorix now uses PDS which attempts to use a…

Anecdotal, but I noticed a lot better browser performance when switching to no I/O scheduler, "none". I also noticed that Linux wasn't trying to use most of my RAM for buff/cache.
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