After the launch of a latest stable version, the community that develops the Linux kernel takes a week to pick up what they are going to do in the next. So Linus Torvalds launched a few hours ago Linux 5.19-rc1, a version that will bring many improvements. Among them, at least for the moment, nothing has been mentioned about NVIDIA, although the company has already released the first open source version of its driver.
Linux 5.19-rc1 has arrived with a larger than normal size, partly because of the AMD graphics driver. For everything else, Linus Torvalds says that this week has been quite normal, but for him everything that is not a relatively serious problem is normal.
Linux 5.19-rc1 is larger than normal
Anyway, aside from those three "process" issues, things seem perfectly normal. Judging by the merge window, this version is going to be bigger, but it's certainly not going to break any records, and nothing seems particularly weird or crazy. The diffstat is skewed by another generated AMD GPU registry descriptor header drop, but I guess even that is "normal" at this point. It is certainly not something new. And if the rivers/gpu/drm/amd/include/ subdirectory is ignored, the stats are as they usually are: about 60% drivers, the rest being architecture updates, tools, documentation, and some relatively minor kernel updates ( file systems, mm, networks, etc.). Oh, and handling of core modules was broken down into more manageable pieces instead of one big file.)
Linux 5.19-rc1 is the first Release Candidate in this series. The stable version will arrive on 24 July if only 7 are released and a week later, or two, if it doesn't come into shape in time. Ubuntu users interested in installing it will eventually have to do it on their own, using tools like Umki, formerly known as Ukuu.