The Linux 6.19 kernel remains on track for its official release two weeks from today, with the extra RC being baked in due to the end of year holidays. Out today is Linux 6.19-rc7 with a few changes worth highlighting for the week.
With Linux 6.19-rc7 there is the newly-merged continuity planning for the Linux kernel development should Linus Torvalds’ official upstream Git kernel repository ever become inaccessible or other unforeseen circumstances arise. An important fix/revert for the week is an AMDGPU revert to address various issues that have been reported on Linux 6.19 going back to its merge window.
Another notable fix for the week is disabling the NEXT_BUDDY scheduler functionality for Linux 6.19 as it was found to cause some performance regressions. I’ll have up some interesting NEXT_BUDDY comparison benchmarks on Linux 6.19 Git tomorrow that I have been working on over the weekend.
There is also a fix for Linux’s “subtly wrong” page fault handling code the pasr 5 years as another prominent fix for the week.
Yet another fix worth calling out in Linux 6.19-rc7 is ATA fix for a power management regression the past year of the Linux kernel for some ATAPI devices and in turn preventing the CPU from reaching low-power C-states.
Also of note for the week are more ASUS laptops being supported by the ASUS Armoury driver that was merged via the x86 platform driver subsystem at the start of the Linux 6.19 cycle.
Linus Torvalds wrote in today’s 6.19-rc7 announcement:
“So normally this would be the last rc of the release, but as I’ve mentioned every rc (because I really want people to be aware and be able to plan for things) this release we’ll have an rc8 due to the holiday season.
And while some of the early rc’s were smaller than usual and it didn’t seem necessary, right now I’m quite happy I made that call. Not because there’s anything particularly scary here – the release seems to be going fairly smoothly – but because this rc7 really is larger than things normally are and should be at this point.
Now, it’s not *hugely* larger than normal, so it’s not something that makes me worry, but it’s just large enough that it makes me go “good that we have an extra week”.
Anyway, it all looks otherwise very normal. A bit over half is drivers (networking and gpu being most of it as usual, but there’s a bit of everything in there), and the rest is the usual random mix: tooling, architecture fixes, VM, networking, rust driver base fixes, documentation, some filesystem work…
So we have two more weeks to go, and apart from the different timing, nothing looks particularly odd or worrisome.”
With the extra RC, Linux 6.19 stable should be out in two weeks on 8 February. See the Linux 6.19 feature overview for a look at all the interesting changes in this next Linux kernel version.
