Linux Kernel 6.19.4 and 6.18.14 brings a handful of quiet fixes and a few bright‑spot improvements
The newest kernel releases arrives with a mix of hardening, driver polish and some performance nudges that may surprise even the most casual users.
A tidy sweep in ATA, block and network drivers
A long‑running issue with Intel SSDs – the so‑called SSDSC2KG480G8 device sometimes hung when a 4 MiB write was issued – has finally been addressed. The patch adds an explicit max‑sector quirk that tells libata to treat the drive as if it could safely handle only 8191 sectors, bringing those drives back into play.
In the network space, several Intel NICs now correctly report their supported XDP features. If you were seeing your Linux laptop drop packets when a high‑rate XDP program was attached, that has been fixed; the driver no longer advertises an empty feature list and can be exercised by tools such as iproute2 without causing hard crashes.
The bonding driver receives a small but important tweak: the ALB path that processes ARP frames is now protected against a use‑after‑free that would otherwise have caused KASAN to complain when a device was brought up or torn down quickly. That kind of race can surface as an “invalid memory address” message, so you’ll no longer see that spurious alert during rapid link reconfigurations.
USB, Bluetooth and media get their share of attention
USB‑C probe code for a handful of cheap dongles was silently ignoring the result of a bulk endpoint descriptor check. The added logic now checks whether those endpoints are of the right type (bulk or interrupt) before proceeding, so you won’t run into mysterious “NULL pointer dereference” failures in cat when talking to a device that mislabels its USB descriptors.
Bluetooth endpoint handling receives another win: after removing the old idle_thread_get() error‑pointer check, it is now correctly verified against the driver’s list of S4 events, preventing false positives that could trigger a panic. That was useful for folks who run Windows or ChromeOS VMs on Linux and need to be confident their ACPI tables are sane.
The Bluetooth driver for the aw99706 backlight chip also had an out‑of‑bounds write bug when the HDMI header split bit wasn’t set correctly; this patch now ensures the header is only written if you’re using a “correct” vendor chemistry flag, keeping your system’s GPU and PCIe controllers from stalling.
Multiple Bugs and Improvements Across Various Drivers and Components
A bug in the Hyper-V driver causes a lockdep report when booting with PREEMPT_RT enabled, which has been fixed by using kthread for vmbus interrupts. The ext4 file system also had several bugs addressed, including a memory leak and inconsistent bitmap reports. These fixes ensure that the ext4 file system behaves correctly and doesn't experience issues like memory leaks.
In addition to the Hyper-V and ext4 driver patches, several other device drivers have been updated. The AMD display driver, Intel Xe graphics driver, and NVIDIA GPU driver are among those that had bugs fixed. These patches address issues such as null pointer dereferences, incorrect bitmask logic, and resource type validation errors. The patches also fix problems with the drm/amd/display driver, including a missing unwind in amdgpu_ib_schedule().
Other updates addresses an issue with the macvlan module where it was possible to dereference a null pointer, leading to crashes. The ipvs module has also received updates to resolve problems related to destination DSTs when the dev is going down. Additionally, several other drivers have been updated to fix various issues, including problems with the usb bdc driver and the typec ucsi driver. The pinctrl driver for the canaan K230 SoC was updated to properly initialize the device node reference count and avoid leaks.
Several USB-related patches were also merged into the kernel to address issues with the usb controller. The ip6_sock_set_v6only() function in the IPv6 module has been fixed to prevent a race condition that could lead to crashes. The netfilter nf_tables driver was updated to handle concurrent requests to add or remove chains properly, avoiding data corruption and crashes.
Linux kernel 6.19.4 released
Linux kernel version 6.19.4 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.19.4.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.19.4.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.19.4.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.19.4/v6.19.3
Linux kernel 6.18.14 released
Linux kernel version 6.18.14 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.14.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/patch-6.18.14.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.18.14.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v6.18.14/v6.18.13
