Liquorix Kernel

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.

  --- VM ---
  Mem dirty before bg writeback..: 10 %  -> 20%
  Mem dirty before sync writeback: 20 %  -> 50%
  
  --- CPU Scheduler ---
  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 Frequency Scaling ---
  Ondemand down scaling factor...:  1    -> 10

• Preemptible tree-based hierarchical RCU: RCU implementation for real-time systems.
• Hard Kernel Preemption: Most aggressive 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.
• Westwood TCP Congestion Control: Proper QoS over TCP, maximizes throughput guaranteeing higher speeds than Cubic.
• Smaller TX Net Queues: Reduced queue size on network devices to combat buffer bloat.
• Ubuntu ureadahead Support: Compatible with Ubuntu's readahead.
• AUFS (Another Union File System) Support: Liquorix can be used on Live CD/DVD/USB where AUFS is required.
• Binary Compatibility Cross Distro: Compatible with Debian Testing and newer as well as latest Ubuntu. Worst case, a package rebuild will be required on older distributions.
• 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.

sources.list

# /etc/apt/sources.list.d/liquorix.list
deb http://liquorix.net/debian sid main
deb-src http://liquorix.net/debian sid main

# Mirrors:
#
# Unit193 - France
# deb http://mirror.unit193.net/liquorix sid main
# deb-src http://mirror.unit193.net/liquorix sid main

Keyring

All packages in the liquorix repository are signed. Run the command below to install the keyring package for liquorix.net.

apt-get install liquorix-keyring

Install

The Liquorix kernel can be installed by way of meta-packages. This will guarantee that the latest kernel is installed on every upgrade.

32-bit without PAE (HIGHMEM4G):

apt-get install linux-image-liquorix-686 linux-headers-liquorix-686

32-bit with PAE (HIGHMEM64G):

apt-get install linux-image-liquorix-686-pae linux-headers-liquorix-686-pae

64-bit:

apt-get install linux-image-liquorix-amd64 linux-headers-liquorix-amd64