Linux 5.19 brings many new features from initial LoongArch CPU support to continued work on bringing-up AMD Zen 4 CPUs, AMD RDNA3 enablement continuing, more work on Intel DG2/Alchemist, Intel Idle driver support for Alder Lake, initial Raptor Lake P graphics support, Zstd compressed firmware, and some nice performance improvements.
Asahi Linux
In today's Linux 5.19 release announcement, Linus Torvalds went on to write about his Arm-based MacBook usage now under Linux thanks to the work of the Asahi Linux project:
On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It's something I've been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it's finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now.
It's the third time I'm using Apple hardware for Linux development - I did it many years ago for powerpc development on a ppc970 machine. And then a decade+ ago when the Macbook Air was the only real thin-and-lite around. And now as an arm64 platform.
Not that I've used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But I'm trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too.
More commentary can be found via the release announcement .
Linus Torvalds also noted he will likely end up calling Linux 5.20 as the Linux 6.0 kernel.
See my Linux 5.19 feature overview for a full list of the major feature changes in this new kernel.