We don’t usually look at individual releases of the Linux kernel, in part because most updates are fairly routine. Any update to the Linux kernel fixes some bugs, improves support for existing hardware, and introduces some forward-looking changes in anticipation of new hardware, and kernel version 5.19 is no exception. Phoronix and OMG! Ubuntu! both have good overviews of the changes.
But there is one interesting note about this release that Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds mentions in his release notes: The kernel update is being released using an Arm-based laptop, specifically the M2-powered version of the Apple MacBook Air.
“This is something I have been waiting for a long [sic] time and it is finally a reality thanks to the Asahi team,” writes Torvalds. “We’ve had arm64 hardware running Linux for a long time, but so far none of them have been used as a development platform.”
Torvalds uses Linux on his MacBook M2 with Asahi Linux, a distribution that works to reverse engineer Apple’s hardware. The Asahi team’s ultimate goal is to send all this work upstream to the mainstream Linux kernel so that all distributions can benefit, and Asahi added support for new Apple chips like the M2 or M1 Ultra relatively quickly as they were released.
Back in November 2020, Torvalds wrote that the then-new Air M1 “would be almost perfect”as an Arm Linux laptop, but said “I don’t have the time to fiddle with it or the inclination to fight it.”companies that don’t want to help.”
On one level, this news is just a slightly interesting little thing – for most Linux users, it doesn’t matter what computer Linus Torvalds is currently using, and Asahi Linux is still in a rough, early state where many things are half-functional or working. non-functional. But as Asahi contributor Hector Martin points out, having “real people…running Linux on a real, modern ARM64 platform” with a modern version of the Arm instruction set and a “nearly original kernel” has a domino effect that benefits the rest of the ecosystem.
More people using Arm versions of Linux means more people fixing Arm-related bugs that will benefit all distributions, and more people identifying and fixing Arm-specific issues in their own software (“own testing”, as Torvalds says in his notes). In the end, the experience of using Linux on Arm hardware should improve for everyone, though it could take years to get rid of those benefits. But together with hardware efforts such as Qualcomm’s new high-performance Arm chips and Microsoft’s commitment to Arm hardware and software, they could make Arm-based PCs more compelling and competitive alternatives to traditional PCs with Intel and AMD x86 processors.
It’s also worth noting that Torvalds believes Linux kernel version 5.20 will eventually become version 6.0, not because of any specific feature updates, but because he is “starting to worry about getting confused again by big numbers”. Kernel versions 3.x and 4.x were also moved to the next major version number around release 20.