Raspberry Pi Begins Rolling Out The Linux 4.19 Kernel

The Raspberry Pi folks have been working the past few months on upgrading their kernel in moving from Linux 4.14 to 4.19. That roll-out has now begun.

Linux 4.19 has been the target of the Raspberry Pi Foundation due to this newer kernel being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release and thus will be maintained for the long-term. That large jump in the standard kernel version for Raspberry Pi ultimately means less work too for the developers involved: between 4.14 and 4,19, a lot of Raspberry Pi patches and other Broadcom improvements were upstreamed.

For Linux 4.19 alone on the Raspberry Pi front was updates to its voltage driver, under-voltage issue reporting, and the VC4 DRM changes we see each cycle. Over the span of 4.14 to 4.19 are a lot of improvements upstream and now less patches that need to be re-based and carried by the Raspberry Pi crew. Linux 4.14 debuted in November 2017 while Linux 4.19 came out just this past October, so basically a year's worth of kernel updates.

The rpi-firmware code was bumped this week to Linux 4.19 and their Linux source tree also updated.

Those firing off rpi-update can begin enjoying this new kernel release. Some users though are reporting WiFi issues as a warning.

I'll be running some 4.14 vs. 4.19 benchmarks on a few Raspberry Pi boards to look for any performance differences worth pointing out.