Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 6.19-rc6 kernel in working toward the stable Linux 6.19 kernel release likely on 8 February.

Linux 6.19-rc6 is now available for testing. While typically it would be the stable kernel version one week after next week’s 6.19-rc7 release, Linus Torvalds already indicated he intends to go through v6.19-rc8 this cycle to accommodate due to slower testing/fixing around the end of year holidays. So with that Linux 6.19 stable should be out on 8 February followed by the start of the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle.

With today’s Linux 6.19-rc6 test release there is a fix for USB2 and USB3 issues on various Apple M1/M2 Macs, an assortment of graphics driver fixes, a sound workaround for the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X and various new laptops including some Intel Panther Lake models, and a variety of other fixes throughout.

Linus Torvalds wrote in the 6.19-rc6 announcement:

"So we finally ended up with a slightly bigger rc than usual for this stage in the release cycle, but it’s not _that_ big, and things still seem quite stable and civilized. IOW, I’m just chalking this all up to some pent-up work from the holidays, although it might also just be random fluctuations in the pull request timings. Things started out pretty calm the last week, and a lot of the work came in over the weekend. Which is not unusual, but it was perhaps even more pronounced than it sometimes is.

Anyway, the slightly larger size does make me think that my plan to do an extra rc8 remains reasonable, even if the whole "nothing looks odd or scary" means that it probably isn’t really a hard requirement.

The diffstat looks pretty normal, with drivers (all together now: networking and gpu dominates) being about a third of it all, with the rest being all the usual suspects: a fair amount of selftests, some documentation, some arch updates, and various core kernel, mm and filesystem updates."

See the Linux 6.19 feature list to look at all of the interesting changes coming for this first major kernel version of 2026.