In addition to Linus Torvalds doing some vibe coding and more with his new "AudioNoise" project this week, Linux 6.19 kernel development ticked back up with the holidays having passed. A variety of fixes made it into today’s Linux 6.19-rc5 release in working toward v6.19 stable in early February.

With Linux 6.19-rc5 there is fixing recent breakage for newer NVIDIA GPUs on the Nouveau driver. Another notable fix this week is addressing another possible attack vector on RISC-V in following similar behavior to ARM64 and x86_64. There is also a notable fix in Linux 6.19-rc5 for addressing a Rust Binder issue.

Outside of the typical "fixes", the latest kernel code does include Logitech MX Anywhere 3S HID++ support for enabling high resolution scrolling and other extra functionality. That HID++ support for the MX Anywhere 3S along with ELECOM M-XT3DRBK (018C) support were among the HID "fixes" for the week.

Linus Torvalds wrote in the 6.19-rc5 announcement:

"Normal release, a couple of hours later than usual, but nothing particularly odd going on the past week. As expected, we’re pretty much back to a normal schedule after the holidays, and the stats look very regular, both in number of commits and in the patch.

Drivers dominate (being about two thirds of the rc patch), and gpu and networking are the major part of that. As is tradition. There’s some other driver updates too, but nothing that looks odd.

Outside of drivers it’s the usual suspects: various filesystem fixes (btrfs, nfsd, minor erofs fix and some generic vfs fixes), tooling (mostly seltfests, and most of those are part of the networking and gpu pulls), and some architecture fixes (arm64 and risc-v)."

Linus previously indicated an extra 6.19-rc would likely come due to the holidays so the Linux 6.19 cycle will likely conclude with a stable release on 8 February. There are many exciting Linux 6.19 changes/features for this first 2026 kernel release.