The second weekly release candidate of [1]Linux 6.19 is now available for testing in leading up to the stable release in early February.

Linux 6.19-rc2 is now available with a week's worth of early bug/regression fixes following the closure of the Linux 6.19 merge window. There is a [2]fix/workaround for a particular Seagate Barracuda hard drive where it's problematic for the SATA bus with Link Power Management (LPM) enabled. Not a fix but a safe addition given it's just new vendor/device IDs is [3]adding CRKD guitar controller support to the XPad driver . Plus a variety of other fixes.

Linus Torvalds wrote in the [4]6.19-rc2 announcement :

"So we've had a pretty quiet week, as is normal for rc2. Not very many commits, and the diff isn't all that big either. And a lot of it is actually just selftests and documentation updates - about a third of the patch, to be exact.

Another third is driver updates (GPU and networking being the bulk of it, as is tradition).

And the final third is "the rest": architecture fixes, filesystem fixes, networking and core kernel.

Nothing particularly stands out, but the shortlog is appended for people who want to get a view into the details.

I obviously expect next week to be even quieter, with people being distracted by the holidays. So let's all enjoy taking a little break, but maybe break the boredom with some early rc testing?"

See our [5]Linux 6.19 feature overview to learn about all of the great changes to be found in this first major Linux kernel release of 2026.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.19

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.19-Seagate-HDD-Fix

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.19-rc2-CRKD-Guitars

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wh9KGxiU2D1gz45YscAHBvoWKux6qdWmpVaLs2nKse2yA@mail.gmail.com/T/#u

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-619-features-changes