Linus Torvalds Announces First Release Candidate of Linux 6.19 Kernel for Public Testing

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of the first Release Candidate (RC) for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel series, now available for public testing.

This comes two weeks after the release of Linux kernel 6.18, which will be an LTS (Long-Term Support) branch, maintained until at least December 2027. With the merge window for Linux kernel 6.19 now open, users can begin testing the RC versions over the next few months.

The first Linux 6.19 Release Candidate comes up with new features such as Intel Nova Lake S audio support, a SoundWire SCDA generic class driver with regmap support, DRM Color Pipeline API support, initial Intel Xe3P support, and hardware monitoring (hwmon) for AMD Steam Deck APU.

Other anticipated updates in Linux kernel 6.19 include new objtool features, a klp-build script for generating livepatch modules from source patches, filesystem improvements to increase the minimum writeback chunk size, and the introduction of a new Terminus 10×18 bitmap console font for better readability on modern laptops.

Linus Torvalds Announces First Release Candidate of Linux 6.19 Kernel for Public Testing

Linus Torvalds says”

So it's Sunday afternoon in the part of the world where I am now, so
if somebody was looking at trying to limbo under the merge window
timing with one last pull request and is taken by surprise by the
slightly unusual timing of the rc1 release, that failed.

Teaching moment, or random capricious acts? You be the judge.

Anyway, this merge window was slightly unusual in how we had a number
of kernel maintainers on the road the last week due to the yearly
maintainer summit, but also in how some of the core pull requests were
about various conversions to expand on and use more of our automatic
compiler cleanup infrastructure. That happened in several subsystems,
but the VFS layer stands out.

And on the Rust front, we are now starting to see several actual
drivers starting to take form. The "mainly preparation and
infrastructure" phase is starting to become "actual driver and
subsystems development".

That said, despite a few unusual patterns, the big picture really
looks pretty normal: half the rc1 patch is driver updates (gpu,
networking, media and sound stand out as big subsystems as usual, but
there's pretty much everything in there). The rest is all over the
map, with architecture updates, tooling, Rust support, tooling,
documentation, and core kernel (mm, scheduler, networking) updates.

Below is my mergelog as a rough overview of what I've pulled and from
who - for full details you have to go to the git tree.

                  Linus

The first Linux 6.19 Release Candidate is available for download right now from the kernel.org website.