After two months of development, Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux kernel 5.19, in the announcement, Linus said that the next kernel version is likely to be 6.0, since there are enough versions in the 5.x branch to change the first number in the version number. The change of numbering is done for aesthetic reasons and is a formal step that alleviates the inconvenience caused by the accumulation of a large number of numbers in the series.
linus too you mentioned that you used an Apple laptop based on the ARM64 architecture (Apple Silicon) with a Linux environment based on the Asahi Linux distribution to form the launch . It's not Linus's main workstation, but he used the platform to test his suitability for kernel work and to make sure he could build kernel builds on the fly with a lightweight laptop at hand.
Main news in Linux 5.19
In this new version that is presented significant optimizations have been made to the exFAT driver, Related to ensuring simultaneous wiping of a group of sectors with 'dirsync' mode active, rather than sequential sector-by-sector wiping. By reducing the number of block requests after optimization, the performance of creating a large number of directories on the SD card increased by more than 73-85%, depending on the size of the cluster.
The first corrective update of ntfs3 driver which is included in this kernel. Since the inclusion of ntfs3 in kernel 5.15 in October last year, the driver has not been updated and communication with the developers has been lost, but now the developers have resumed posting changes. The proposed patches fix bugs that cause memory leaks and crashes, resolve problems with running xfstests, clean up unused code, and fix typos.
In addition to this, it is also highlighted that removed code to support a.out executable file format, which was deprecated in version 5.1. The a.out format hasn't been used on Linux systems for a long time, and modern tools don't support generating a.out files in default Linux configurations. The a.out file uploader can be implemented entirely in user space.
For architecture RISC-V, support is provided for running 32-bit executable files on 64-bit systems. bits, a way to bind limiting attributes to memory pages (for example, to disable caching) is added, and the kexec_file_load() function is implemented.
The subsystem EFI implements the ability to confidentially transfer secret information to systems guests without revealing it to the host system. The data is provided through the security/coco directory in securityfs.
The lockdown security mode, which restricts root access to the kernel and blocks UEFI Secure Boot bypass paths, fixed a loophole that allowed security to be bypassed by manipulating the kernel debugger.
On the other hand, it is highlighted that added support for AMD SEV-SNP extension (Secure Nested Paging), which provides secure working with nested memory page tables and protects against "undeSErVed" and "SEVerity" attacks on AMD EPYC processors, which allow the AMD SEV (Secure Encrypted Virtualization) extension to be bypassed. ) protection mechanism.
Added support for the Intel TDX mechanism (Trusted Domain Extensions), which allows you to block attempts by third parties to access the encrypted memory of the virtual machine.
In addition to that, continued working on stack integration network tools to trace the reasons for dropped packets (reason codes). The reason code is sent during the release of the memory associated with the packet and allows situations such as discarding the packet due to errors in filling fields in the header, detection of spoofing by the rp_filter filter, incorrect checksum, out of memory to be taken into account. , IPSec XFRM rule activation, incorrect TCP sequence number, etc.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it about this new version, you can check the details In the following link.