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The time has come to say goodbye to the Linux 5.19 kernel series as it is now marked as EOL (End-of-Life) on the kernel.org website, and users are now urged to upgrade to a newer kernel branch.
Linux kernel 5.19 was released on July 31st, 2022, and it’s a short-lived kernel branch, which means that it is supported with maintenance updates for about three months. It introduced new features like support for ZSTD-compressed firmware files, support for AMD’s Secure Nested Paging feature, as well as initial support for Loongson’s “LoongArch” RISC ISA CPU architecture.
Linux 5.19 also bought a new user-space API for managing MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) flows, support for the ARM Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), the ability to run 32-bit binaries on 64-bit systems for RISC-V architectures, and a new generic ticket spinlock type to add support for full qspinlock implementation in various architectures like RISC-V, OpenRISC, and C-SKY.
Renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today the release of Linux kernel 5.19.17, which is a pretty hefty update with 767 changed files, 7188 insertions, and 3389 deletions. But what’s most important is the fact that Linux kernel 5.19.17 is also the last maintenance release for the Linux 5.19 kernel series.
This means that Linux kernel 5.19 is now marked as EOL (End-of-Life) on the kernel.org website and it will no longer receive maintenance updates that address critical bugs or patch security holes. In other words, if you don’t upgrade to a newer, supported kernel release, your system will become vulnerable to all sorts of threats and attacks.
Currently, there are many GNU/Linux distributions that ship with Linux kernel 5.19 by default, including the recently released Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu), so it’s very important that you upgrade to the Linux kernel 6.0 series or one of the long-term supported (LTS) kernels.
Popular rolling-release distributions like Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed are already running Linux kernel 6.0, and it’s also coming to supported Fedora Linux releases, including the upcoming Fedora Linux 37, which is currently slated for release on November 1st, 2022.
However, please note that Linux kernel 6.0 is also a short-lived branch, which will probably be maintained only until January 2023. Meanwhile, development continues on the next LTS (Long-Term Support) series, Linux kernel 6.1, which should hit the streets in early or mid-December 2022.
Last updated 1 year ago
