Benchmarks Of The Liquorix Linux 4.17 Kernel

It's been a while since last benchmarking the Liquorix kernel that is a modified version of the Linux kernel. Liquorix was recently updated against Linux 4.17 and a premium patron requested some fresh benchmark results.

Liquorix for those out of the loop is a configured and patched kernel intended to deliver an optimal experience for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads. Liquorix makes use of Zen interactive tuning, the MuQSS process scheduler (formerly BFS), hard kernel preemption, BFQ, minimal debugging options, and various other changes. Liquorix is designed to be trivially installed on Debian and Ubuntu systems via APT/PPA repositories.

For satisfying the premium supporter, I ran the tests on a Core i9 7980XE system in the same hardware/software configuration. The CPU differences reported on the table come down to the Liquorix kernel using the CPUFreq ondemand governor rather than P-State powersave, which reports the base/boost clocks differently. The current Liquorix 4.17 kernel was benchmarked against a "vanilla" (mainline) Linux 4.17.3 kernel as well as Ubuntu 18.04's stock Linux 4.15 kernel. The kernels were tested using their stock binaries and without making any other modifications to any of the kernels off the same Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installation.



Liquorix favors responsiveness over throughput, so the I/O results tend to be mixed in the benchmarks.





Liquorix actually delivered the lowest average frame-rates in the various Linux game tests carried out.





The other results tended to be mixed. Granted, it's hard to quantify the responsiveness of the desktop system. Additional data is available via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. Those wishing to try out the Liquorix kernel can find it at Liquorix.net.