Debian User Forums

I've been playing arround with Liquorix Kernel, and you guys, what have been using now days? Stock? Own Kernel?

https://liquorix.net/

The one that comes from the Debian repos. Whatever version that is at the moment. Works for me.

I used to compile my own kernels, back in 1999 or so. Now that you're unlikely to find a machine with so little RAM that a custom kernel is needed, why bother with the added effort?
I haven't had any problems whatsoever with the stock kernel, and the supposed "optimisations" in e.g. the Liquorix build don't make any noticeable difference, at least as far as I can tell.

steve_v wrote:The one that comes from the Debian repos. Whatever version that is at the moment. Works for me.

I used to compile my own kernels, back in 1999 or so. Now that you're unlikely to find a machine with so little RAM that a custom kernel is needed, why bother with the added effort?
I haven't had any problems whatsoever with the stock kernel, and the supposed "optimisations" in e.g. the Liquorix build don't make any noticeable difference, at least as far as I can tell.

Do you play games or make multimedia edition at this machine? For me it made difference on that.

Capitain_Jack wrote: Do you play games or make multimedia edition at this machine? For me it made difference on that.

If by "make multimedia edition" you mean video editing, then no. But I play plenty of games.

steve_v wrote: If by "make multimedia edition" you mean video editing, then no. But I play plenty of games.

Multimedia means all media types, video, image and audio.

Capitain_Jack wrote:Multimedia means all media types, video, image and audio.

Okay then, I play videos, occasionally edit audio (less of the playing, as I have an MPD server elsewhere), and edit images every now and then.
I even installed the Liquorix kernel yesterday to see if anything had changed... And I still see no difference.
No subjective "feels" that seem to be all the rage here, and no measurable performance difference in 3 games + Blender (Blenchmark). Identical framerates.
Dunno man, The Debian kernel seems just fine to me.

Works better on this ThinkPad X201 than any Linux kernel I've ever tried

steve_v wrote:

Capitain_Jack wrote:Multimedia means all media types, video, image and audio.

Okay then, I play videos, occasionally edit audio (less of the playing, as I have an MPD server elsewhere), and edit images every now and then.
I even installed the Liquorix kernel yesterday to see if anything had changed... And I still see no difference.
No subjective "feels" that seem to be all the rage here, and no measurable performance difference in 3 games + Blender (Blenchmark). Identical framerates.
Dunno man, The Debian kernel seems just fine to me.

Do a video render test, it is where I see most difference. Also when creating music with Reason 5 (trough wine) or any other hard professional audio recording/editing software.

This is a more comprehensive text talking about the differences:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ubunt ... TimeKernel

Also here for detail into real time computing:
"...Real-time computing is sometimes misunderstood to be high-performance computing, but this is not an accurate classification....Therefore, the most important requirement of a real-time system is predictability and not performance..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing

Capitain_Jack wrote:This is a more comprehensive text talking about the differences:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ubunt ... TimeKernel

Also here for detail into real time computing:
"...Real-time computing is sometimes misunderstood to be high-performance computing, but this is not an accurate classification....Therefore, the most important requirement of a real-time system is predictability and not performance..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing

Liquorix is not a real time kernel, so what does this have to do with anything?

steve_v wrote: Liquorix is not a real time kernel, so what does this have to do with anything?

Ok, I see you need to see "the insides" to understand fully, take a read here:
https://techpatterns.com/forums/about2499.html

Capitain_Jack wrote:Ok, I see you need to see "the insides" to understand fully, take a read here

Nope, still no mention of realtime patches there. Yes, Liquorix tweaks the scheduler, but it's not a realtime kernel.
As for "insides", I'll take real patch notes over a random techpatterns forum post anyday, much less the links to reddit.

Believe it or not, I have a fairly good idea what the patches Liquorix includes do. I've patched, tweaked, and mucked about with custom kernels plenty in the past.
Now I don't bother, because the Debian build is just fine for desktop use. If I was doing pro-audio work where predictable latency is critical, I might use the realtime patches.
If I could detect a performance gain from the Liquorix patches with any workload I care about, I'd use that too.

steve_v wrote:Nope, still no mention of realtime patches there.

I never said it is a real time kernel, but here the part of the text where he mention it's aiming a real time sytem:

Enables NOCB for all CPUs, increasing RCU overhead
Per the options in the kernel configuration, this increases overhead but reduces OS jitter and is more appropriate for a real-time system (what we're aiming for here, a better experience).

https://techpatterns.com/forums/about2499.html

steve_v wrote: If I was doing pro-audio work where predictable latency is critical, I might use the realtime patches.
If I could detect a performance gain from the Liquorix patches with any workload I care about, I'd use that too.

That's why I use it. This is a good discussion, we should and could open a new post, what do you say? have more or less the same conversation? Would you start this one?

anticapitalista wrote:

Code: Select all

 uname -a
Linux antix1 4.14.8-antix.1-amd64-smp #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Dec 20 15:19:11 EET 2017 x86_64 GNU/Linux

That's a good one for old hardware, keeps it updated and very very light one.

What is important to me is that I always have at least two kernels installed and that they have proven to work. What we frequently see here on the forum is someone posting that they did an upgrade and it replaced the kernel and the new one is causing troubles and there is no fallback. Or there is some other problem and someone says try another kernel but there isn't one. With two kernels in situ it makes for an easy test when troubleshooting.

Bulkley wrote:I always have at least two kernels installed and that they have proven to work

Good advice

Debian keeps the last installed kernel anyway and maintains symlinks to the root directory as /vmlinuz.old & /initrd.img.old and these can be booted from in an emergency, I think the auto-generated GRUB menu even has entries for them.

Yup, it does indeed.
I have the the installer image and Partedmagic in /boot/images as well, since I so thoroughly dislike unbootable systems. Never actually had a bad kernel from the Debian repos mind, force of habit from less reliable distros.

Bulkley wrote:always have at least two kernels installed and that they have proven to work... With two kernels in situ it makes for an easy test when troubleshooting.

That's for sure, no matter witch kernel you use, it should be a rule. I think more than two of the same is exaggerated, to clarify that you can have more than one kernel installed with no major problem other than more update time.