Liquorix Linux Kernel 7.2-13 Merges Linux 7.2.8, Drops the Scheduler Patches
Liquorix shipped the 13th point release of its 7.2 kernel branch on September 26, and it's a quieter one than recent history would suggest.
Steven Barrett, who maintains the project, released linux-liquorix 7.2-13, merging upstream Linux 7.2.8 and bumping the version to 7.2.8-1. The changelog is terse on purpose.
"merge v7.2.8 / update version to 7.2.8-1."
That's really the whole story. What makes it worth a look is what's not in it. Unlike most of its siblings in the 7.x line, this release adds no fresh batch of Project-C scheduler patches. Those got folded in across releases 7.2-1 through 7.2-12. This one is a maintenance pass, not another overhaul.
Keep in mind that Project-C is the thing that makes Liquorix Liquorix in the first place. It's Barrett's evolution of the PDS/BMQ scheduler the project inherited from the Zen Kernel, and it completely reworks CPU scheduling for interactive workloads. The gist: keep related tasks on the same physical core when possible, route wakeups to keep task pairs together, and lay scheduler state out along cache lines to cut contention.
The 7.2 series in context
The branch kicked off August 31, 2026, with the switch from 7.1 to kernel v7.2. Since then the cadence has been aggressive, roughly one release every three to five days through the early weeks.
The development churn is worth a look. The 7.2 line saw PDS credit-decay fixes, an SMT balance revert, idle-selection tuning, and a notable freeze mitigation in release 7.2-6 where task-walk scanning got bound under interrupts disabled. There was even a use-after-free fix earlier in the cycle, plus a temporary full revert of some Project-C work in 7.2-6 before it was reworked. That back-and-forth says something about the pace at which Barrett is hammering on this scheduler.
By 7.2-13, the heavy lifting had settled down. The result is a stable, well-tested build of what is arguably Liquorix's most ambitious scheduler work running on one of the latest stable kernel bases available.
Project-C and the low-VRAM angle
Beyond the scheduler, this branch introduced the dmem-ttm-v8 patchset for systems with limited video RAM. It ties cgroup-based device memory accounting (dmemcg) into the TTM buffer management used by AMDGPU and similar DRM drivers.
Valve has contributed related work here too, the so-called "dmemcg-booster," aimed squarely at VRAM management on consumer GPUs. For anyone gaming on a machine with a smaller frame buffer, that's a real pain point, and the integration directly addresses it.
The package also carries the full Zen Interactive profile, which is the part that trades throughput and power efficiency for responsiveness. Clocks stay high during interactive bursts, and split-lock detection is switched off. That removes a performance-halting penalty that mainly shows up in benchmark-style workloads. It's a deliberate choice. You won't win efficiency points, but you won't feel input lag either.
Not cheap to run on your power bill, perhaps. But it's free software, so the trade-off is entirely yours.
As usual, Liquorix is installable via the one-line curl-to-bash script:
curl -s 'https://liquorix.net/install-liquorix.sh' | sudo bash
Head here to the GitHub page.
