Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.19 stable to the latest Linux kernel. He also mentioned that this is the first time he has released a new Linux kernel from an ARM64 laptop in the form of an Apple MacBook running on the AArch64 Apple M1 SoC.
Linux 5.19 brings many new features from initial LoongArch CPU support to ongoing work on AMD Zen 4 CPU rollouts, continued AMD RDNA3 enabled, more work on Intel DG2/Alchemist, Intel Idle driver support for Alder Lake, graphics support Initial Raptor Lake P, compressed Zstd firmware, and some nice firmware to improve performance.
Asahi Linux
In today’s Linux 5.19 release announcement, Linus Torvalds continued to write about his use of his Arm-based MacBook that is now Linux-based thanks to the work of the Asahi Linux Project:
On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did this post (as I write this) on an arm64 laptop. This is something I’ve been waiting for all along, and it’s finally happening, thanks to Team Asahi. We’ve had arm64 machines around Linux for a long time, but none of them have actually been used as a development platform yet.
This is the third time I’ve used Apple hardware for Linux development – I did this many years ago to develop powerpc on my ppc970. Then over ten years ago, when the Macbook Air was the only device that’s thin and light. And now as arm64 platform.
Not that I’ve used it for any real work, I literally just ran builds and bootstraps tests, and now the actual version is tagged. But I’m trying to make sure that the next time I’m traveling I can travel with this like a laptop and finally feed on the arm64 side as well.
More comments can be found via the checkout announcement.
Linus Torvalds also noted that it might end up calling Linux 5.20 the same as the Linux 6.0 kernel.
See my Linux 5.19 Features Overview for a full list of the major changes in this new kernel.
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