Linux 6.19-rc2 Released Following A Quiet Week

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 21 December 2025 at 07:04 PM EST. Add A Comment

The second weekly release candidate of 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 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 adding CRKD guitar controller support to the XPad driver. Plus a variety of other fixes.

👁 Linux 6.19-rc2 Git tag

Linus Torvalds wrote in the 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 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.