It's been a long time since hearing much out of the Zenwalk project, the Linux distribution built off Slackware. It's still around though and with their latest kernel work are hoping for a "true low latency desktop experience" by employing the BORE scheduler.

Most Zenwalk news is close to twenty years old on Phoronix but for this Slackware-compatible distro but was surprised this week with a Phoronix reader sending in a news tip over their effort to have a "true low latency desktop experience". Zenwalk was an interesting distribution back in the way when Slackware also had more prominence:

Their main deliverable with this new low-latency desktop effort is shipping a kernel making use of the BORE scheduler . The BORE scheduler is an out-of-tree option that is also found available on CachyOS and other Linux distributions. BORE is short for the Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer and caters to bursty tasks like gaming, audio, and desktop needs.

Zenwalk is now providing a Slackware kernel build with BORE patched in and otherwise compatible with upstream Slackware. The Zenwalk blog talks up this kernel experience as:

"While the stock Slackware kernel hangs and drop frames when playing audio during a simple application compile task in background : In my tests this new kernel plays audio flawlessly while a big application compiling and a massive multi-thread media transcode are running in background : it's day and night !"

So Zenwalk is still pushing ahead and now with the BORE scheduler looks to provide a better desktop experience.

Those wanting to try out the BORE scheduler on their own or learn more can do so via the BORE scheduler on GitHub .