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Here we go again! Linus Torvalds just announced today the availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming Linux 5.19 kernel series, officially kicking off the development cycle.
Two weeks have passed since the release of Linux kernel 5.18 and the opening of the merge window for Linux kernel 5.19, which is now officially closed, and the first Release Candidate build is now out to give us a very early taste of what’s about to be included in the final release.
According to Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 5.19 looks to be a big release with another great set of improvements for AMD GPU users. About 60% of the release is new and updated drivers for better hardware support, but there are also architecture updates, tooling and documentation improvements, as well as some minor core kernel updates (filesystems, mm, networking, etc.).
Linus Torvalds also notes the fact that the long-time ARM generic kernel effort is now “pretty much done” after more than 10 years of hard work from everyone involved. “The StrongARM platforms remain with their separate kernels, and are expected to stay so, but compared to where things were a decade ago, this is a pretty big step,” added Linus Torvalds.
Without further ado, if you want to test the upcoming Linux 5.19 kernel series against your hardware, you can download the Release Candidate build right now from the kernel.org website. However, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version so don’t install it on a production machine!
The final release of Linux kernel 5.19 is expected somewhere at the end of July 2022, either on July 24th or July 31st, depending on how many Release Candidates will be published until then, something only Linus Torvalds knows. After that, expect GNU/Linux distributions to start shipping the Linux 5.19 kernel in their repositories in mid-August 2022.
Last updated 2 years ago
