Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 5.19 release candidate 1. The release is for testing only and it shouldn’t be used on a production machine. The first release candidate means that the development cycle is now officially started two weeks after the release of Linux Kernel 5.18. It also means that the merge window for Linux Kernel 5.19 is now officially closed.
Improvements for AMD GPU
Linus Torvalds stated that Linux Kernel 5.19 will be a big release. It will come with various improvements for AMD GPU users. It also includes various new and updated drivers, allowing the new version to support hardware better. Along with minor core kernel updates, it also comes with architecture updates, tooling, and documentation improvements. Linus Torvalds said,
« Anyway, apart from those three “process” issues, things look perfectly normal. Judging by the merge window, this release is going to be on the bigger side, but certainly not breaking any records, and nothing looks particularly odd or crazy. The diffstat is skewed by yet another drop of generated AMD GPU register descriptor headers, but I guess even that is “normal” by now. Certainly not a new thing. And if you ignore that drivers/gpu/drm/amd/include/ subdirectory, the stats look like they tend to do: roughly 60% drivers, with the rest being architecture updates, tooling, documentation and some relatively minor core kernel updates (filesystems, mm, networking etc. Oh, and the core module handling got split up into more manageable pieces rather than one big file).
One thing of note is how the long-time ARM generic kernel work (aka “multiplatform”) is pretty much done after 10+ years. Congrats to everybody 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 »