Liquorix 7.2-15 Tracks Linux 7.2.9, and Reverts a Patch Only Five Days Old
Liquorix maintainer Steven Barrett shipped the new point release today. Its changelog undoes work he'd done the previous Friday.
Liquorix maintainer Steven Barret published 7.2-15. It tracks upstream Linux 7.2.9, which Linus Torvalds's team shipped as stable two days earlier, on October 3. The changelog is three lines, and one of them erases Barrett's own work from the previous release.
The patch being undone is a Project-C scheduler tweak titled "sched/alt: Let a stacked wake pair take turns when no CPU is idle." Barrett had folded it into 7.2-14 five days earlier. Now it's gone. Ship it, measure it, pull it back before the week ends. That's a fast, empirical loop, and it's the kind of thing mainstream mainline can't match with its months-long review grind.
Liquorix isn't a fresh kernel. It's vanilla Linux with a pile of enthusiast patches bolted on, tuned for snappy interaction, low latency, and steady frame times. Think desktop use, audio and video work, gaming. That's the audience. Raw throughput and battery life are willing sacrifices.
What's Under the Hood
The tuning reads like a checklist for anyone who cares about responsiveness over efficiency. The scheduling timeslice shrinks from 4ms to 2ms. Watermark boosting is off. CPU-frequency thresholds get nudged. Bus-lock detection is disabled. You also get a 1000 Hz tick rate, hard kernel preemption, and a preemptible RCU setup.
Here's the rest of the feature set:
- PDS / BMQ scheduler - fair schedulers built for gaming and real-time loads.
- High-resolution scheduling - the 1000 Hz tick, for low-jitter task dispatch.
- Hard kernel preemption - one of the most aggressive models short of full RT patches.
- Disk I/O - Kyber for multiqueue drives, BFQ for single-queue gear.
- TCP BBR2 - throughput-focused congestion control.
It ships as a drop-in replacement for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch.
Keep in mind that Liquorix's versioning trips up first-time readers, and that's the scheme's fault, not yours. The label 7.2-15 means the 7.2 series at package revision 15. Internally it renders as 7.2.9-1, which is upstream version 7.2.9 with the first packaging number tacked on.
One thing worth flagging: 7.2.9 isn't an LTS. It's the current stable mainline line, while the longterm trees sit at 6.18, 6.12, 6.6, 6.1, 5.15, and 5.10. By tracking mainline, Liquorix keeps users on the newest code and forgoes the extended support window. Fine if you reinstall often. Less fine if you set and forget.
Getting It
The install script is the quick path:
curl -s 'https://liquorix.net/install-liquorix.sh' | sudo bash
Head here for the packaging repo and the 7.2-15 release tag.
