Linux kernel 5.18 was released in late May 2022 and is another short-lived kernel series. It introduces new features such as support for tracking “user events” on the system, support for AMD’s “host system management port” feature, support for 64-bit integrity checksums on NVMe devices, support for Intel’s “hardware feedback interface, and as indirect branch tracking support for the x86 architecture.

kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman recently released Linux kernel 5.18.19, which appears to be a very minor patch containing only six changes. Most importantly, Linux kernel 5.18.19 is also the last maintenance release of the Linux 5.17 kernel series, which is now end of life and will no longer receive security and bug fix updates.

Officials are urging users to upgrade to the Linux 5.19 kernel series. GNU / Linux distribution maintainers and users who prefer to compile their own kernel can now get the latest Linux 5.19 kernel from the kernel.org website, but keep in mind that this is also a short-lived branch that may be supported until late October 2022.

Several popular rolling release distributions already run Linux kernel 5.19, including Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Ubuntu users can easily install Linux kernel 5.19 from the Ubuntu Kernel Mainline PPA. If you don’t want to upgrade the kernel every few months, you can stick to the Long Term Support (LTS) branch, such as Linux 5.15 LTS.

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Linux Kernel 5.19 introduces a number of new features and functions, adding support for LoongArch CPUs and Zen 4 CPUs in terms of new hardware, continuing to improve support for AMD RDNA 3 and Intel DG2/Alchemist, adding Intel Idle drivers for Alder Lake, initial support for Raptor Lake P graphics, support for Zstd compression firmware, and further performance improvements.

In the Linux Kernel 5.19 changelog released today, Linux Torvalds states that the contents of these changelogs were done on an Apple MacBook laptop, which successfully runs Linux on an ARM-based laptop with the help of the Asahi Linux project.

"From my personal point of view, I think one of the most interesting things is that I did the release on an ARM64 laptop (on which the logs were also written). This is something I've been personally looking forward to for a long time, and now it's finally a reality, and I'd like to highlight the Ashai team. Although ARM64 devices have been able to run Linux for a long time, it wasn't very useful until the Ashai project.

This is the third time I've used Apple hardware for Linux development, having developed for Powerpc on a ppc970 device a long time ago. Now, more than a decade later, I'm doing it again on a MacBook Air, a slim laptop.

But at this stage I'm not using the MacBook Air for any real work - I'm just using it for version testing, launching, and now releasing. But I'll try to migrate my work to this MacBook, and maybe I'll be able to fully embrace ARM64 in the next release."

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