As anticipated due to the extra week for the cycle given end of year holidays, Linus Torvalds today released the Linux 6.19 stable kernel as the first major release of 2026. There is a lot in store with this early 2026 kernel release.
Linux 6.19 as usual is especially heavy on Intel and AMD changes including AMD GCN 1.0 / GCN 1.1 dGPUs now defaulting to the AMDGPU driver rather than Radeon legacy driver for better performance, RADV compatibility out-of-the-box, etc. On the Intel side there is more enablement work for Wildcat Lake and Nova Lake platforms. Plus Intel Linear Address Space Separation (LASS) and Content Adaptive Sharpness Filter (CASF) are among the new features enabled. Linux 6.19 also mainlines the DRM Color Pipeline API backed by Valve, various file-system improvements, the ASUS Armoury and Uniwill platform drivers, and much more.
See the Linux 6.19 feature overview for a more extensive look at the changes of this new kernel.
Linux 6.19 started off to a rough start with spotting several performance regressions in Linux 6.19. Eventually it looks like the multiple scheduler woes have been resolved in time for the Linux 6.19 release. I’ll have out new Linux 6.18 / 6.19 / 7.0 Git benchmarks once the next merge window passes.
Now it’s onward to the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle — more than likely to be known as Linux 7.0 — and is expected to see many exciting changes introduced over the next two weeks. It’s that next kernel that will be powering the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS this spring. Update: Linus Torvalds confirmed in the release announcement that Linux 7.0 is the next version.
Go grab Linux 6.19 from kernel.org if rolling your own Linux kernel build.