The Linux 6.19-rc1 kernel is out to cap off the Linux 6.19 merge window. The kernel release is coming the better part of a day earlier due to Linus Torvalds being in Japan for this past week’s Linux Plumbers Conference and Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit.

Torvalds wrote of the 6.19 merge window:

"So it’s Sunday afternoon in the part of the world where I am now, so if somebody was looking at trying to limbo under the merge window timing with one last pull request and is taken by surprise by the slightly unusual timing of the rc1 release, that failed.

Teaching moment, or random capricious acts? You be the judge.

Anyway, this merge window was slightly unusual in how we had a number of kernel maintainers on the road the last week due to the yearly maintainer summit, but also in how some of the core pull requests were about various conversions to expand on and use more of our automatic compiler cleanup infrastructure. That happened in several subsystems,but the VFS layer stands out.

And on the Rust front, we are now starting to see several actual drivers starting to take form. The "mainly preparation and infrastructure" phase is starting to become "actual driver and subsystems development".

That said, despite a few unusual patterns, the big picture really looks pretty normal: half the rc1 patch is driver updates (gpu, networking, media and sound stand out as big subsystems as usual, but there’s pretty much everything in there). The rest is all over the map, with architecture updates, tooling, Rust support, tooling, documentation, and core kernel (mm, scheduler, networking) updates."

The details can be read on the LKML.

There have been many Phoronix articles over the past two weeks summing up all of the interesting changes from AMDGPU by default for GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs, interesting file-system work, continued preparations for AMD Zen 6 and Intel Nova Lake / Diamond Rapids platforms, and much more. Our customary Linux 6.19 feature overview will be out in the next day or so.