XanMod, Liquorix Kernels Offer Some Advantages On AMD Ryzen 5 Notebook

Motivated in part by the recent le9 kernel patches that are already carried by XanMod and not having benchmarked the XanMod or Liquorix Linux kernel downstreams in a while, here are some fresh benchmarks of Liquorix and XanMod against the recent upstream Linux kernel releases.

The XanMod kernel continues to cater to desktop workloads, including gaming and live production low-latency needs. Among the changes with XanMod are carrying of the le9 patches along with LRNG, Futex2 patches, multi-generational LRU as another exciting series, the Paragon NTFS3 file-systme driver, Clear Linux patches, and other alterations. A lengthier list of features/changes can be found at XanMod.org. As of testing, the latest stable kernel for XanMod was their 5.12-17 kernel and their latest edge version was 5.13.2 Edge, both versions of which were tested.

Liquorix meanwhile carries the MuQSS scheduler patches, Zen interactive tuning, BFQ, multi-generational LRU, and other patches as outlined at Liquorix.net. The latest kernel there as of testing was the Liquorix 5.12 kernel.

For comparing the XanMod and Liquorix performance, the latest upstream kernels of Linux 5.12.17, Linux 5.13.2, and Linux 5.14-rc1 were benchmarked as well.

The same system was (obviously) used for testing all of these kernels. For going with a mainstream target, a Lenovo IdeaPad with Ryzen 5 5500U (Zen 2) processor, Vega graphics, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB Samsung NVMe SSD was used for testing with an Ubuntu 21.04 host. Each kernel was tested in its default/out-of-the-box configuration.