New year, new Linux kernel. Early 2026 has seen the stabilization phase of the current 6.19 release that brings many interesting technical features. The technical bits are accompanied by several discussions about matters related to the kernel community. These mostly took place at the Linux Maintainer Summit in December 2025 and include:

• the succession planning in case something would happen to Linus
• better development tools for the kernel
• the successful conclusion of the kernel Rust experiment
• a policy for machine-learning tools in kernel development

While not all discussed guidelines and process changes are included in the 6.19 release, there is already broad consensus and it is fair to say that they will pave the way for a bright future of the Linux kernel.

As always, LWN provides a detailed look into the 6.19 features:

• The beginning of the 6.19 merge window
• The rest of the 6.19 merge window

In a continued effort, Collabora contributed to Kernel 6.19 with no less than 125 patches authored by 21 developers. Let's have a look at all those contributions!

Display and Graphics

The tireless maintenance of the open ARM Mali GPU drivers continued. And to emphasize that this shall not change in the future, Adrián Larumbe was appointed co-maintainer for the Panfrost driver.

In that capacity, he fixed the GPU job handling in the Panfrost driver. Furthermore, Ashley Smith and Boris Brezillon provided fixes to the scheduler in the Panthor driver. Boris also added job manager contexts in order to improve the scheduling of jobs in Panthor. Loïc Molinari improved the Panthor IOMMU map/unmap debugging logs. And finally, Vivek Das Mohapatra fixed the initialization of the backlight level values from hardware in AMD DRM driver.

MediaTek Improvements

Similar to its predecessors, this kernel release contains many improvements and additions for MediaTek SoCs. AngeloGioacchino Del Regno introduced support for the HDMI Transmitter IP found in the MediaTek MT8195/MT8188 SoCs. He also upstreamed support for the power sequence required for the Modem domains, and for new types of power domains found in the latest Dimensity 9400 and Kompanio Ultra SoCs, including support for the Hardware Voter domains, located in the new High Frame Rate Processor System (HFRPSYS), and for the MediaTek MT6363 and MT6316 PMICs, commonly found in board designs using MT6991 or MT8196 SoCs. Ariel D'Alessandro converted the device tree bindings of the MediaTek Media Data Path to the new YAML format. Julien Massot cleaned up the MT8183 device tree by aligning the audiosys node names with the corresponding schema. Louis-Alexis Eyraud added the MT8365 SoC GPU support and enabled it for the MediaTek Genio 350-EVK board. He also fixed the I2C/DDC lines write operations in the MediaTek HDMI TX v2 driver. Finally he added new compatibles in the devicetree bindings for several MT8189 SoC IP blocks (watchdog, efuse,...) and a new entry in the MediaTek Soc Info driver data for the MT8390 SoC (Genio 720). Nicolas Frattaroli worked on the MT8196 GPU support including the GPU frequency control. Nícolas F. R. A. Prado prevented system hangs during startup of the MT8395 EVK board by describing the CPU supplies properly.

And as part of his quest towards Running Debian on the OpenWrt One router, Sjoerd Simons submitted additions to the device trees of the MT7981B SoC and the OpenWrt One mainboard, respectively. He also fixed the probing of the MediaTek HDMI TX driver.

Rockchip SoC Enablement

Once again, the Rockchip SoC enablement team was quite busy in this release cycle. Cristian Ciocaltea advanced the HDMI output functionality of the RK3588 and RK3576 SoCs, providing upstream support for CEC and 10-bit color depth, alongside various fixes and improvements. Daniel Stone carried out cleanup and maintenance work on the Rockchip VOP2 display controller. Dmitry Osipenko took over the driver maintenance for the Synopsys HDMI receiver IP core and will continue to take care of this nice bit of hardware. By providing a driver for the Rockchip Camera Interface (rkcif), Michael Riesch made a first step towards mainline video capture and camera support on recent Rockchip SoCs. And finally, Sebastian Reichel fixed various issues related to system suspend and resume on the RK3576.

Rust for Linux

While the successful completion of the Rust experiment is highly encouraging, there is still plenty of work to do. Fortunately, Daniel Almeida did his fair share of the work by improving the locking API.

Multimedia

In the realm of multimedia, Nicolas Dufresne stabilized the driver for the Hantro G2 HEVC decoder.

Miscellaneous Bits

And as usual, all of the above is accompanied by a mixed bag of fixes and improvements. Ariel D'Alessandro converted the device tree bindings of the Marvell 8897/8997 Bluetooth controller, the MELFAS MIP4 touchscreen, and the Dialog DA9211 voltage regulator to the new YAML format. Arnaud Ferraris fixed a subtle bug in the USB Type-C port manager support code. Cristian Ciocaltea improved the logging in the VHCI HCD driver. Sebastian Reichel reverted a change in the Qualcomm battery manager driver as it turned out that the charge control disabling did not work as expected. And last, but not least, Valentine Burley made the DragonBoard 820c firmware load path more robust.

Below is a full list of contributions made by Collabora for the 6.19 release, as recorded in the git commit history:

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