Linux 7.1 is now officially live!
A new major version of Linux is now live as of June 8th, 2026! Linux 7.1 is the brand new version of Linux under the v7.x version series that provides you with improvements regarding lots of kernel components.
According to Phoronix, Linux 7.1 provides the following changes when it comes to the CPU portion, including, but not limited to:
- Old i486 processors begins to become unsupported in the future
- Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) in Panther Lake systems improves system performance
- Real Time (RT) kernel builds works for ARM 32-bit processors
- EPYC Venice processors becomes ready with the new AMD SBI driver and the new AMD SMCA bank types
- Many improvements land to LoongArch’s kernel support
- pKVM protected guests becomes available in a “very experimental” state
- Intel Linear Address Space Separation (LASS) becomes more stable on Linux 7.1
- Intel QAT zstd support becomes available in Linux 7.1
Additionally, the graphics portion of the kernel has seen improvements and additions, including:
- A Coreboot framebuffer DRM driver becomes available in this version of Linux
- New hardware support lands to the AMDGPU driver
- Improved old hardware support lands to the AMDGPU driver
- AMD “Kaveri” APUs and other GCN 1.1 APUs become more reliable using the AMDGPU driver
- Intel Xe driver deals with video memory pressure and out of memory more reliably
- Intel Nova Lake P graphics card support lands to Linux 7.1
As for the file system, the following changes have been made:
- New NTFS file system driver gets added to improve performance and reliability over the existing NTFS3 driver
- Existing NTFS3 file system driver gets updated with general improvements and bug fixes
- exFAT file system driver now reduces fragmentation and becomes more reliable
- XFS, EXT4, and F2FS file system drivers get bug fixes
- JFS file system driver now hardens data integrity
- RAID fixes land to Linux 7.1
Other miscellaneous changes have been made to the kernel to improve user experience and to improve performance of your device, such as retiring UDP-Lite code and removing many old network drivers, such as ISDN, ham radio, and other old network drivers. The IPv6 kernel support is now no longer modular; it’s either compiled in the kernel or not. The minimum Rust version requirement has also been increased.
Additionally, more hardware support has been added, including RTL8157 5Gbit and RTL8125cp ASICs, Bitland MIFS WMI driver (for Chinese laptops), Lenovo Yoga Fan driver, Apple SMC power driver, and Lenovo Legion Go driver.
The official announcement has been made by Linus Torvalds in the kernel mailing list, which says:
So it's only Sunday morning back home, but it's Sunday afternoon where I am right now, so I'm doing the 7.1 release at the regular time - just not in the regular timezone.This obviously means that the merge window opens tomorrow, but I'll be in yet another timezone by then, so timing will all be a bit irregular. Normally I try to front-load the merge window and do as much as possible the first few days - this time I'm not sure that will work out with my laptop and a couple of long flights without internet, but I've made sure that I have fetched the early pull requests (thank you - you know who you are), so I will be able to do some of it off-line.Anyway, possible slight hiccups in the merge window aside, the news today is 7.1. Below is the shortlog for the last week - nothing particularly interesting or scary stands out, which is as it should be. It's mostly various smaller driver updates (gpu, networking, sound, misc) with some networking and trace tooling fixes. And random minor changes elsewhere.Please do keep testing despite the release, and apologies in advance if my merge window latency is going to be a bit random the next few days. I briefly considered just extending the release for a week, but decided it wasn't really worth it. I may come to regret that decision,
Linux v7.2 will be the third version from the v7.x series that will be released after today’s Linux 7.1, which will bring many improvements and additions to enhance your user experience.
Arch Linux and other distributions will be updated to utilize Linux 7.1, with rolling distros being updated first, then the subsequent distributions will utilize this version of Linux according to the distro’s release schedule. Meanwhile, keep checking for updates in your Linux distro (such as [mark]pacman -Syu[/mark] as root in Arch Linux), or compile it from source.
To download Linux 7.1’s source code, click on the below buttons:
Source code
Patch
PGP signature
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