Liquorix vs. Linux 6.12 Upstream Kernel Performance Across Many Workloads

A Phoronix Premium subscriber a while back requested some fresh benchmarks of how the Liquorix downstream of the Linux kernel is comparing against the latest upstream kernel... Here are some benchmarks looking at the Liquorix flavor of the Linux kernel compared to upstream Linux 6.12.

Liquorix is a patched version of the Linux kernel with extra functionality and changes compared to the mainline Linux kernel or what is typically shipped by Linux distribution vendor kernels. Liquorix is "designed for uncompromised responsiveness in interactive systems" and features the Zen interactive tuning code, the PDS process scheduler, 1000Hz tick rate, hard kernel preemption, BFQ support, MGLRU enabled, and various other features while also making it convenient to run this kernel with pre-compiled binaries for Ubuntu/Debian systems. Those unfamiliar with this Linux kernel build can learn more at Liquorix.net.

From the same AMD Ryzen 9 9950X system with WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe SSD and Radeon RX 7800 XT graphics I ran benchmarks of the upstream Linux 6.12.5 kernel with a configuration following the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA config and then using the Liquorix 6.12.5-1 pre-built image for Ubuntu. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was running on this AMD Zen 5 desktop system. No hardware or software changes besides swapping out the kernel being used.

Across 101 benchmarks the upstream Linux 6.12 kernel was faster than the Liquorix kernel for 56 of the benchmarks...

On a geo mean basis across all of the benchmarks, the upstream kernel ended up being faster by 21%.

The Liquorix kernel ended up performing particularly bad in LiteRT (TensorFlow-Lite), srsRAN, Apache cassandra, and other select workloads. But the Liquorix kernel did perform well in some of the synthetic kernel micro-benchmarks, Darktable, video / image encoding, and other select workloads.

Those interested can see all 101 benchmarks in full via this result file.