Description

LIQUORIX KERNEL

※ Upstream GitHub repo

Liquorix is a distro kernel replacement built using the best configuration and kernel sources for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads.

Major Features

• Zen Interactive Tuning: Tunes the kernel for responsiveness at the cost of throughput and power usage.

--- Virtual Memory Subsystem ---------------------------

Mem dirty before bg writeback..:  10 %  ->  20 %
Mem dirty before sync writeback:  20 %  ->  50 %

--- Block Layer ----------------------------------------

Default MQ scheduler......: mq-deadline -> bfq

--- CPU Scheduler (CFS) --------------------------------

Scheduling latency.............:   6    ->   3    ms
Minimal granularity............:   0.75 ->   0.3  ms
Wakeup granularity.............:   1    ->   0.5  ms
CPU migration cost.............:   0.5  ->   0.25 ms
Bandwidth slice size...........:   5    ->   3    ms

--- CPU Scheduler (MuQSS) ------------------------------

Scheduling interval............:   6    ->   4    ms
ISO task max realtime use......:  70 %  ->  25 %

• MuQSS Process Scheduler: Fair process scheduler for gaming, multimedia, and real-time loads.
• High Resolution Scheduling: High resolution timeouts and 1000Hz tick rate for precise low jitter task scheduling.
• Preemptible tree-based hierarchical RCU: RCU implementation for real-time systems.
• Hard Kernel Preemption: Most aggresive kernel preemption before requiring real-time patches. Guarantees responsive system under high intensity mixed workload scenarios.
• Budget Fair Queue: Proper disk scheduler optimized for desktop usage, high throughput / low latency.
• TCP BBR2 Congestion Control: Fast congestion control, maximizes throughput, guaranteeing higher speeds than Cubic.
• WineSync/NTSync module available: Fast, kernel-backed syncing support driver module for Wine for faster performance. (Copr exclusive)
• Distribution Kernel Drop-in Replacement: Proper distribution style configuration supporting broadest selection of hardware. Paravirtualization options enabled to reduce overhead under virtualization.
• Minimal Debugging: Minimum number of debug options enabled to increase kernel throughput.
• Binary Builds For Fedora® and Enterprise Linux*: Binary builds are produced on Copr for EPEL 8, CentOS 8 and 9 Stream, and Fedora® Linux 33, 34, 35, and Rawhide

*) Liquorix kernel is NOT based on RHCK and thus may break bug-for-bug compatibility with RHEL (for instance, kmod packages from ELRepo will NOT work, and akmod packages from RPMFusion may not be compatible with the kernel-devel of Liquorix kernel). You should not run this software on a machine that requires compatibility with RHEL.

to support the previous package maintainer (donations to upstream can be given here)

Installation Instructions

Fedora® Linux, EPEL 8-compatible distros, and CentOS 9 Stream:

sudo dnf copr enable jplie/kernel-lqx
sudo dnf in kernel-lqx

Also kernel-lqx-devel and kernel-lqx-headers required if planning to build kernel modules (e.g. nvidia proprietary driver)

sudo dnf in kernel-lqx-devel kernel-lqx-headers

Optionally, you may sign the kernel image and modules for secure boot. Follow the instructions here

Active Releases

The following unofficial repositories are provided as-is by owner of this project. Contact the owner directly for bugs or issues (IE: not bugzilla).

Release	Architectures	Repo Download
Fedora 40	x86_64 (6)*	Fedora 40 (20 downloads)
Fedora 41	x86_64 (0)*	Fedora 41 (7 downloads)
Fedora rawhide	x86_64 (2)*	Fedora rawhide (11 downloads)

* Total number of downloaded packages.