Liquorix Linux Kernel 7.2-9 Refines Project-C Scheduler After a Nine-Release Sprint
The AMD64-only enthusiast kernel caps a rapid development cycle with idle selection tweaks and VRAM improvements.
Liquorix has pushed linux-liquorix 7.2-9, its ninth release on top of the new Linux v7.2.4 base in under two weeks. The update is AMD64-only and was tagged on September 9, 2026. The changelog is short. It boils down to an idle CPU selection tweak for Project-C and a version bump to 7.2.4-3.
If you've been tracking the 7.2 branch, you've probably noticed the pace. Steven Barrett started the sprint on August 31 with 7.2-1 and didn't stop until 7.2-9 dropped today. Project-C, his custom scheduler built on Alfred Chen's original "Cross" concept, got the full ride. It shipped in 7.2-1, got patched heavily in 7.2-3 through 7.2-5, and was completely rolled back in 7.2-6 after severe regressions forced a reset. Since then, Barrett has been reintroducing it piece by piece.
The Idle Selection Fix
The new patch tells the scheduler to keep a synchronous wakee pinned to the waker's physical core until that core is fully occupied. In practice, that means less cross-core thrashing when you're juggling bursts of tasks. It also builds on the freeze-prevention patch Barrett dropped in 7.2-8, which was itself a response to hang reports on SMT-enabled hardware. A community forum post from yesterday confirms the issue had been nagging users, and the rapid iteration cycle seems to be dialing it in.
The trade-off here is familiar to anyone running enthusiast kernels. You're getting bleeding-edge scheduling tweaks, but you're also riding shotgun on a development train that's moving faster than a standard stable release. Not cheap in terms of system stability, but the AMD64-only scope keeps the blast radius small.
What Liquorix Still Brings to the Table
Beyond the scheduler shuffling, this is still the kernel people run when they want low-latency audio, tight frame times in games, or a snappier desktop. Default settings push the block scheduler to Kyber or BFQ, drop CPU frequency thresholds to 55%, shrink scheduling timeslices to 2ms, and keep hard kernel preemption enabled. You can grab it via the curl script on liquorix.net:
curl -s 'https://liquorix.net/install-liquorix.sh' | sudo bash
Head here to the full changelog feed if you want to dig into the 7.2.4-3 cycle. Keep in mind that upstream kernel v7.2.4 is already a stable release, so the real value here is entirely in the scheduler and memory tuning. The 7.2-8 release that preceded this one also reintroduced the dmem-ttm-v8 patches, which help low-VRAM systems, most notably the Steam Deck, avoid OOM crashes under heavy DRM/TTM pressure. It's a welcome addition if you're squeezing modern workloads out of older GPUs.
