New Linux 6.19-rc3 kernel candidate adds CPU idle detection for POWER11

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 6.19-rc3, explaining that the development has remained quiet over the holiday week, which was to be expected as people wind down from work. The release, as a result, is relatively small and consists primarily of driver updates and minor architecture fixes.

The majority of the changes in this release are concentrated in the drivers subsystem. There are significant documentation fixes in kernel-doc for the Snapdragon driver and various reverts in the Display Processing Unit Code. The update also contains solutions for numerous quirks on specific laptops from Asus, HP, Honor, and Medion, as well as resource leak fixes in probe paths. There are also updates for Intel and NXP/Freescale audio components.

The third release candidate also brings several reverts in the Type-C UCSI driver, fixes for resource leaks in various controller drivers including dwc3, renesas, and lpc32xx, and storage/phy adjustments. The update also brings fixes for device initialization, sysfs information restoration, and architecture bug fixes for Longson, Xilinx, and Renesas.

Architecture specific updates include the enabling of CPU idle state detection for POWER11, updated PMU tests, and fixed interrupt/syscall exit behaviours on 32-bit systems. For RISC-V systems, ISA extension descriptions for Zilsd and Zclsd have been added, there is improved signal handling, and atomic operations for non-SMP configurations have been optimized.

We are now around early to halfway through the 6.19 kernel cycle, which should last seven or eight weeks. Once it has been released, Linux distributions will make it available after a period of testing. Some distributions won’t release it if they stick to LTS kernels, but if you’re running something Arch-based or Fedora, you’ll likely get it soon after released.

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Posted Tuesday 30 December 2025 at 4:31 am AEST (my time).

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