What’s New in Linux Kernel 5.19? A Deep Dive into Multi‑Platform Milestones

Linus Torvalds announced on June 6 the first release candidate of Linux kernel 5.19, calling it a milestone for the project’s multi‑platform development.

He noted that the development process was challenging due to many late pull requests, but praised that most were correctly signed.

Torvalds expects Linux 5.19 to bring broader improvements without breaking records or introducing strange behavior.

Approximately 60% of the changes are driver updates, including extensive AMD GPU support to work well with the kernel.

The core code is being split into more manageable modules rather than a single large file.

“It is noteworthy how the long‑term work on the ARM universal kernel (aka “multi‑platform”) has finally been completed after more than a decade. Congratulations to all contributors!”

The StrongARM platform remains with its own kernel and is expected to stay unchanged.

New features in Linux 5.19 include support for the LoongArch64 architecture from China’s LongSoon chip company, Apple‑based NVMe support, and code laying the groundwork for Intel’s discrete GPUs.

Another interesting addition is support for HPE’s GXP architecture, which uses ARMv7 and Cortex‑A9 cores and will be a key feature of the company’s next‑generation servers.

Users can determine the running kernel version with any of the following commands:

# uname -r
# cat /proc/version
# dmesg | grep Linux
# ls /boot
# rpm -q kernel