Liquorix 3.8 Kernel Has Some Performance Wins Over Linux

The Liquorix kernel is a modified version of the Linux kernel with out-of-tree patches and a kernel configuration that is highly-optimized for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads. It's been one year since last benchmarking the Liquorix kernel against a vanilla Linux kernel, but now we have some benchmarks of the Liquorix 3.8 kernel compared to the latest stable Linux kernel.

The last time Phoronix benchmarks of Liquorix was done was last March with Ubuntu 12.04. In those days it was the Linux 3.2 kernel and the performance in our benchmarks were fairly close with no super compelling reason for Liquorix. For those not familiar with the Liquorix project, visit Liquorix.net. Aside from offering the sources and configuration as a patch to the mainline Linux kernel, there are Debian Sid packages of the latest Liquorix stable kernel (the packages also work fine on Ubuntu) as well as an Arch Linux AUR package. Benchmarking the Liquorix 3.8 kernel was done against the mainline Linux 3.8.0 and 3.8.6 kernels. The Linux 3.8.0 kernel was used as the original mainline Linux 3.8 release while Linux 3.8.6 was the latest vanilla 3.8.x point release at the time of testing. The Liquorix kernel was labeled 3.8-6.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64. The Liquorix kernel was obtained from the project's Debian repository while the vanilla kernels were from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.

Testing happened from a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 laptop with an Intel Core i7 720QM processor, 4GB of RAM, 160GB Intel SSD, and NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics. Ubuntu 13.04 was the base operating system with the modified kernels.

All benchmarking happened in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.