Liquorix Ships 7.2-22, Tracking Linux 7.2.13
Liquorix maintainer Steven Barrett, released kernel 7.2-22 on Monday. It rides Linux 7.2.13 on top of the project's usual low-latency Zen tuning, then stops. No new patches. No new features. No surprises, by design.
That restraint is a change of pace. In the two weeks leading up to Monday, Barrett shipped five different builds, and one of them briefly dragged server-class memory management into a desktop gaming kernel.
A conservative capstone
The release note for 7.2-22 is about as terse as stable tracking gets. Barrett's merge lands on commit be15713fe, signed with a verified GPG key (ID 9AE4078033F8024D), and the message simply reads "merge v7.2.13" with a version bump to 7.2.13-1. There's no banner, no feature list, no editorializing.
In practice, 7.2-22 is the build you want if you'd like to forget it exists. It inherits all of 7.2.13's security and bug fixes and layers nothing experimental on top. The Liquorix patch file itself, v7.2.13-lqx1, roughly 9.7 MB, resets to its baseline lqx1 revision every time a fresh upstream version lands.
The week in five builds
7.2-22 is the calm after the storm. Look at what Barrett shipped between October 12 and today.
A zswap and zram compression overhaul landed on October 12 (7.2-18), followed by a plain stable merge two days later (7.2-19). Then came 7.2-20, an experimental build dropped an hour after 7.2-19 that folded in Kairui Song's still-in-review MGLRU Frequency Guided v4 patch set, bringing server and Android memory research into a desktop gaming kernel for the first time.
7.2-21 stepped back from that experiment, swapping in a swap rework instead. And 7.2-22 settles into a clean merge.
The MGLRU-FG numbers were dramatic on paper. Barrett reported +10.3% MongoDB YCSB throughput, +47.4% Chromium and Node.js requests, about +41% LevelDB GET/SCAN, and hot SQLite lookups running roughly 95% faster. Those ran against database, web, and Android workloads, though. Nobody has shown whether frequency-guided memory reclaim actually smooths out a game, which nicely reinforces Liquorix's own "no magic 20%" stance.
What the kernel actually changes
Liquorix is not a new operating system. It's a pre-patched distribution kernel you drop in for the stock Linux kernel on Debian, Ubuntu, or Arch, and the project has been evolving since 2011. Funding comes mostly through donations, and it currently sits around 168 upvotes in the Arch User Repository.
The core pitch is tail latency. Stock kernels tune for broad compatibility and server-style throughput. Liquorix tunes for the single millisecond stall, the frame-time hitch, the audio dropout, the glitches that cost you far more than average benchmark numbers ever reveal.
To shrink that tail, Liquorix swaps the EEVDF scheduler for PDS/BMQ, bumps the tick to 1000 Hz, turns on hard preemption, and switches to Kyber or BFQ for I/O. It also ships TCP BBR3 and disables split-lock detection to shed a small per-operation cost.
The project's own documentation calls out the "common myth that custom zen kernels magically give you 20% more speed" and answers with a blunt "They don't." What you actually get is a livelier feel under interactive load.
Who should care
For desktop gamers chasing consistent frame times, live A/V producers, and AMD64 enthusiasts who just want a snappy desktop, Liquorix is a natural fit. It ships as a drop-in meta-package, so you keep upstream security fixes and never lose the stock kernel, which stays in the GRUB menu as an escape hatch.
It's a poor fit if you run server workloads, care about laptop battery life, or need true hard real-time. Liquorix is AMD64 only, and Barrett points RT users at dedicated kernels or PAZ0 instead.
The fast path works the same across distros:
curl -s 'https://liquorix.net/install-liquorix.sh' | sudo bash
Liquorix builds for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch. Ubuntu builds once lived on a Launchpad PPA but now host on liquorix.net directly, and that PPA reportedly saw 36 updates in the past month alone.
Keep in mind this is a single-maintainer operation. There's no formal test matrix, Barrett has said he relies on "basic dogfooding on most/all of my devices" for QA. Since Liquorix isn't in the official Debian archive, it skips Debian Security Advisories too, so security updates ride Barrett's own schedule. And yes, the rapid pace occasionally throws rough edges; system freezes are a known recurring complaint.
For what it's worth, Liquorix and XanMod land within a fraction of a percent of each other in raw benchmarks, and the choice usually comes down to scheduler preference. When something does go sideways, the forum on TechPatterns, GitHub Issues, and the AUR comment threads are where Barrett shows up most actively.
