Adding to [1]the early headaches of Linux 6.19 with some regressions in performance and functionality were ARM64 hosts crashing on this in-development kernel version for those platforms using EFI. But a fix is now merged ahead of Linux 6.19-rc3 due out tomorrow.

It sure would be nice if more ARM64 hosts used EFI, especially in the single board computer (SBC) space but for now it's a more common trait for ARM64 Linux servers. In any event it turns out ARM64 EFI code was to blame for systems crashing when trying to boot the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel.

ARM64 hosts were hitting a null pointer dereference on boot. It turned out to be an ARM64-specific problem and was tracked down to a change in how ARM64 calls the EFI runtime services on this next version of the kernel. A one line patch was all that ended up being needed so a member of the EFI struct is properly initialized and avoid crashing ARM64 hosts on Linux 6.19.

[2]The patch to fix ARM64 EFI hosts from crashing was merged on Friday and will be found in Sunday's Linux 6.19-rc3 release.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-619-sched-regress

[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=61ed08c2fd1db0eb43c8b62ade249a3061e39444