Liquorix 7.2-24 ships as the final Linux 7.2 kernel before the 7.3 switch
Another Liquorix kernel has been released today. Kernel maintainer Steven Barrett tagged the build on top of Linux 7.2.15, the very last 7.2 release Greg Kroah-Hartman will ever push out. Think of it as the final 7.2 kernel most users will get from Liquorix.
Liquorix isn't a kernel you set and forget. Barrett runs the project solo as a distro-kernel replacement, layering patches onto vanilla upstream mainline to chase low latency and snappy interactive response. Gamers, A/V producers, and people who dislike frame-time judder tend to gravitate toward it. The 7.2.15 payload here carries eight fixes from seven contributors, several of them security-relevant, and the stand-out stops an unprivileged user from writing into a root-owned file's page cache.
If you've read Liquorix release notes before, you know they're terse by design. The 7.2-24 note is a single line:
* merge v7.2.15 * update version to 7.2.15-1
The X.Y-N numbering does more work than it looks like it does. The 7.2 is the upstream series, the 24 is the build count, and the internal patch line v7.2.15-lqx1 ties the whole thing back to upstream. So the build simply bundles 7.2.15 and calls itself 7.2.15-1.
A branch ending early
Greg retired the 7.2 tree on November 1, and his note on the stable mailing list was about as understated as those tend to be.
"Note, this is the LAST 7.2.y kernel release. After this one the 7.2.y kernel tree is end-of-life. Please move to 7.3.y at this time."
He also let slip that the timeline ran a little short, keeping eight branches alive at once being a taxing task under the best of times. 7.2 shipped on August 16 as a performance-focused release. 7.3 arrived October 18. The swap was always going to be quick.
AI-assisted, at both ends
GitHub shows five commits moved Liquorix from 7.2-23 to 7.2-24, and two of them carry a co-authorship line that's still uncommon to see. Both read "Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1." That's the same Anthropic model tagging its own work.
Kernel 7.2.15 itself is tagged the same way. The Samba smbdirect patches and a Bluetooth fix both carry "Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5." So this single build sits right between two separate currents in the same ongoing story: AI-assisted fixes upstream, AI-assisted packaging downstream. One release, two data points.
Most of the actual engineering in this interval is invisible to anyone who just installs the kernel. The two largest commits are about CI resilience, specifically Liquorix's habit of building on EC2 spot instances spread across multiple clouds, where AWS can take a host back with barely a nod.
The change flips where the retry logic lives. Instead of resubmitting the whole job from scratch when a spot host vanishes, the pipeline now retries just the failed node, so only one release in the batch rebuilds. It's the DevOps grunt work that keeps same-day multi-distro builds from collapsing, and nobody writes release notes for it, which is exactly the point.
For what it's worth, that's a sign of a healthy single-maintainer track. Barrett keeps a professional-grade Jenkins pipeline running on his own spot fleets, unusual for a custom kernel and probably why distro enthusiasts trust it for same-day upstream merges.
If a faster-feeling kernel is what you're after, 7.2-24 won't deliver it on its own. This round's merge is "clean," meaning no new Liquorix-specific scheduler patch, and the tuning everyone knows it for, the PDS and BMQ schedulers, 1000 Hz tick, hard preempt, watermarks dropped to zero to avoid memory-throttle stalls, stays put from 7.2-23.
Project-C, Barrett's ongoing research into scheduling for hybrid big.LITTLE and P-core/E-core chips, is where the identity-defining work lives. It's been a near-constant thread since mid-2025, with releases adding wake-affinity logic and cache-aware scheduling, plus the occasional revert when something regressed. That's the stuff that actually changes how the kernel feels on AMD Zen 4/5 and Intel Core Ultra hardware.
The practical upshot is simple: upgrade before you have to. 7.2-24 is the final 7.2.y build, so sitting still means riding a dead branch. The next track runs on 7.3, and eventually 7.4. If you'd rather not move, an LTS line is still around. The current longterm list includes 6.18, 6.12, 6.6, 6.1, 5.15, and 5.10.
You can run this install script if you're ready to switch:
curl -s 'https://liquorix.net/install-liquorix.sh' | sudo bash
Just keep in mind it's AMD64-only, and you'll need to disable Secure Boot. Liquorix does trade raw throughput and battery life for that snappy feel, so it's arguably overkill for anyone whose workload isn't latency-sensitive. XanMod remains the closest same-distro alternative if you want the same vibe with different tuning.
Head here to the Liquorix website.
