Version 3.19 of the Linux kernel has been signed off by Linus Torvalds.

News of the release emerged in a typically economical Sunday evening post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, in which Torvalds noted there are still a couple of bugs in this release but they were pretty obscure so “... while I was tempted a couple of times to do an rc8, there really wasn't any reason for it.”

New in this release is improved support for Intel and AMD graphics, plus support for LZ4 compression in the SquasFS which should make for better Linux performance on Live CDs.

Owners of Lenovo, Dell, Acer and Toshiba will now find Linux plays better with some of their unqiue hardware features, especially keyboard backlights.

The KVM Hypervisor has dropped support for the IA64 chip, a milestone in that architecture's demise.

Torvalds' post says the next version of the kernel will be known as 3.20. That's not something he was keen on in late 2013, when he said “... I would actually prefer to not go into the twenties, so I can see it happening in a year or so, and we'll have 4.0 follow 3.19 or something like that.”

Torvalds' musings at the time imagined release 4.0 might be dedicated to “just stability and bug-fixes”. Little or nothing's been heard of that idea in the months since, so release 3.20 looks like more of the same. ®