Linux Kernel 6.19 was released! Linus Torvalds announced the kernel release on Sunday afternoon:
No big surprises anywhere last week, so 6.19 is out as expected – just as the US prepares to come to a complete standstill later today watching the latest batch of televised commercials. The betting man would expect them all to be AI-generated, but maybe some enterprising company decides to buck the trend? Doubtful, but there’s always a slight chance.
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What’s New in Kernel 6.19
The new kernel added initial support for Tenstorrent Blackhole, the high-performance AI processor and PCIe accelerator family designed by Tenstorrent.
It also added 32-bit version of LoongArch processors support, initial support for Black Sesame C1200 SoC designed for integrate intelligent driving.
For Intel, the new kernel added audio support for the upcoming Core Ultra Series 4 processors (Nova Lake). It added new imh_edac EDAC driver for Xeon Diamond Rapids processors, Linear Address Space Separation (LASS) hardware security feature, as well support the Intel microcode staging feature to deal with large microcode binary.
AMD now has Zen 6 RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) preparation, and Smart Data Cache Injection (SDCI) support, allows for data to be inserted from the I/O devices into the L3 cache directly. And, it improved AES-GCM crypto performance for up to 74% faster for AMD Zen 3 processors.
Image by anirudhlv from Pixabay
For ARM64, it features new MPAM driver for managing shared memory resources useful for servers with multi-user virtual machines. RISC-V now supports CPU hot-plugging in parallel for secondary CPU cores, so it can dynamically enable/disable CPU cores while the system is running.
The Linux graphics now supports Color Pipeline API for hardware-accelerated and standardized color management.
It added initial Intel Xe3P graphics support, initial GPU Support For Snapdragon X2 Elite and Adreno X2-85 GPUs. And, it now uses AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs by default to the AMDGPU driver rather than the legacy Radeon DRM driver.
Other hardware support include:
- Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2.
- Logitech G13 gaming keypad.
- Legion Go 2 handheld
- StarFive VisionFive 2 Lite.
- XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro drawing tablet.
- Realtek RTL8125K, RTL8922DE, RTL8852AU and RTL8852CU.
- Lenovo ThinkBook 16 with the Snapdragon X Plus X1P42100 SoC
- Acer WMI driver for the PH16-72, PHN16-72, and PT14-51 laptop models.
- ASUS Zenbook A14 with Snapdragon X Plus X1P42100 SoC
- Backlight brightness control for Logitech G510 keyboard.
- Enhance support for ROG Ally gaming handhelds and other ASUS enthusiast/gaming devices.
- Fan control on the Dell G5 5505.
- Hardware monitoring support for Apple Silicon SMC.
- Rapid Charge mode support for ThinkBook/IdeaPad laptops.
- Real Time Clock (RTC) driver support for Apple and NVIDIA hardware.
- Uniwill laptop driver for battery charge rate limiting, RGB light-bar control, and hardware monitoring. better hotkey handling.
- USB3 support for Apple Silicon devices.
- Temperature monitoring for Steam Deck.
- Monitoring support for ROG STRIX X470-I GAMING, ROG STRIX X870-F GAMING WIFI, ROG STRIX X870E-H GAMING WIFI7, and Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI, ASUS ROG STRIX X870E-H GAMING WIFI7.
For more about Kernel 6.19, see the great review on phoronix.com.
How to Install Linux Kernel 6.19
The source tarball for the new kernel is available to download in kernel.org.
For Ubuntu, there’s a testing purpose mainline PPA though it’s not updated at the moment of writing. The next will be Linux Kernel 7.0, and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will likely to ship that kernel out-of-the-box.
