Installing a Liquorix Kernel

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GMaq
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Re: Installing a Liquorix Kernel

Post by GMaq »

studio32 wrote: Thu Jun 18, 2020 9:53 am Interesting. I couldn't run Ardour with usb card, p64, Buffer: 2, for +- 10 minuts, zynphasor plugin, without a single xrun.
Then I tried disabling networking in my BIOS. Reboot. No single xrun, same session. Tested both several times.

Turned out, I was accidentally using the liquorix kernel (I thought I did remove it :) ). So there you go, at least one setup where I'm pretty sure, the Liquorix kernel is performing better then the default debian RT kernel.
The variables of hardware are maddeningly infinite, I didn't meant to overstate one way or the other... Liquorix may serve some folks quite well but just like an RT it isn't a guaranteed magic bullet. For me personally recently moving from Debug to Optimized builds of Ardour 6 provided a very noticeable reduction in Xruns and that has nothing to do with either kernels or hardware..*shrugs
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Re: Installing a Liquorix Kernel

Post by WforWoollyMammoth »

milo wrote: Sun Jun 14, 2020 8:53 pm I've been recording vocals in Ardour this afternoon with Liquorix enabled, 26 layers of voices, with active reverb and compressors on various tracks, and have had no xruns.

But I notice a similar thing with DSP and CPU load. Compared to the lowlatency kernel, Liquorix uses about 1-2% more DSP load. According to top the CPU load drops from 48-56% with Liquorix to 42-48% with lowlatency.

As an aside, I also noticed that the linux-lowlatency dummy package that depends on the latest version of the lowlatency kernel won't trigger the install of anything higher than the 4.15-lowlatency kernel (at least in Mint 19.3). I manually marked the 5.4-lowlatency kernel for installation, and I think it does a bit better then the 4.15. CPU usage ranges maybe 2-3% lower with the 5.4-lowlatency kernel compared to 4.15. All of this was playing the same song in Ardour. Not a scientific benchmark study, though.

I think I will also drop Liquorix for now, but may return in the future.
Thank you for posting some values, so that it's easier to have an idea of what the performance on other setups are.

What were your JACK settings? I've preferred to use 256 frames and 2 buffers for larger projects (i.e. anything above 16 tracks with CPU-heavy plugins, like those by u-he, IR loaders etc.)

I've used Liquorix 4-19.0-14.1 for a good while now (1.5 years?) with my AMD Ryzen 7 (eight cores, 3.20Ghz per core). As an audio interface I've used RME HDSPe AIO and RME Babyface Pro (I think the DSP loads are similar, but the latency is much better on the AIO due to it being PCIe). I'm quite happy with the Liquorix kernel, although I do feel that with this setup I'm maybe getting 60-70% of the performance what I'd get on a Windows system. I've just tried to make up for it with the eight core processor :lol:

The Liquorix kernel has worked well enough with the NVIDIA proprietary driver, but I've experienced freezes on Ubuntu's heavier DE's. I've just used LXDE / Openbox and haven't really bothered to troubleshoot the issues with the others.
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Re: Installing a Liquorix Kernel

Post by milo »

I can't remember my JACK settings offhand, and I'm not home at the moment. I will try to remember and reply when I fire the machine up again.
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