The first stable release of Linux Kernel 3.19 was released yesterday by Linus Torvalds. He wrote on the Linux Kernel Mailing List:

So nothing all that exciting happened, and while I was tempted a couple of times to do an rc8, there really wasn’t any reason for it.

Just as an example, Sasha Levin used KASan and found an interesting bug in paravirtualized spinlocks, but realistically it’s been around forever, and it’s not even clear that it can really ever trigger in practice. We’ll get it fixed, and mark it for stable, and tempting as it was, it wasn’t really a reason to delay 3.19.

And the actual fixes that went in (see appended shortlog) were all fairly small, with the exception of some medium-sized infiniband changes that were all reverting code that just wasn’t ready.

So it’s out there – go and get it. And as a result, the merge window for 3.20 is obviously also now open.

What’s new in the Linux Kernel 3.19:

• SI/CI SMC fan control support within the Radeon driver. Should reduce the fan noise on systems with a higher default fan profile.
• Initial GM204 GPU support (NVIDIA GeForce 900 series) in Nouveau driver
• RAID 5 and RAID 6 level support is better off in the Btrfs file-system
• LZ4 Compression Support for SquashFS
• multi-touch for more Logitech devices
• New keyboard backlight support in DELL laptop. ThinkPad ACPI driver reworked to simplify sound muting. Toshiba ACPI driver improvements
• The initial hardware enablement for Skylake, Intel’s successor to Broadwell
• AMD HSA open-source support is closer to reality
• and more ….

How to Install / Upgrade to Kernel 3.19 in Ubuntu:

The Ubuntu Kernel Team has made the binary packages for this kernel release, available for download at link below:

Download Linux Kernel 3.19 (.deb)

First check out your OS type, 32-bit (i386) or 64-bit (amd64), then download and install the packages below in turn:

1. linux-headers-3.19.0-031900_xxx_all.deb
2. linux-headers-3.19.0-031900-generic_3.19.0-031900.xxx_i386/amd64.deb
3. linux-image-3.19.0-031900-generic_3.19.0-031900.xxx_i386/amd64.deb

If you need a low latency system (e.g. for recording audio) then replace the second and third packages with:

1. linux-headers-3.19.0-031900-lowlatency_3.19.0-031900.xxx_i386/amd64.deb
2. linux-image-3.19.0-031900-lowlatency_3.19.0-031900.xxx_i386/amd64.deb

For Ubuntu Server without an UI, you may run below commands one by one to download & install the kernel debs.

For 64-bit system, run:

cd /tmp/

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.19-vivid/linux-headers-3.19.0-031900-generic_3.19.0-031900.201502091451_amd64.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.19-vivid/linux-headers-3.19.0-031900_3.19.0-031900.201502091451_all.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.19-vivid/linux-image-3.19.0-031900-generic_3.19.0-031900.201502091451_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.19.0-*.deb linux-image-3.19.0-*.deb

For 32-bit system, run:

cd /tmp/

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.19-vivid/linux-headers-3.19.0-031900-generic_3.19.0-031900.201502091451_i386.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.19-vivid/linux-headers-3.19.0-031900_3.19.0-031900.201502091451_all.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.19-vivid/linux-image-3.19.0-031900-generic_3.19.0-031900.201502091451_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.19.0-*.deb linux-image-3.19.0-*.deb

When done, restart your computer.

Tip: For Desktop machine running with a proprietary video driver, you may have to re-build/re-install the driver for the new kernel.

If for some reason, the new kernel does not work properly for you, reboot with the previous Kernel (Grub boot loader -> Advanced -> select previous kernel) and run below command to remove the Linux Kernel 3.19:

sudo apt-get remove linux-headers-3.19.0-* linux-image-3.19.0-* && sudo update-grub