Linux kernel 7.1 was officially released stable on September 3, introducing multiple new features and hardware updates [1, 2]. Linus Torvalds announced the release Sunday afternoon in his timezone, noting, "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" [1].
The 7.1 update includes a completely rewritten NTFS driver, support for Intel FRED on Panther Lake CPUs, accelerated performance improvements for Intel Arc Battlemage graphics, and enhancements for older AMD Radeon GPUs [1]. Key new kernel features add new clone() flags for process management, BPF support for io_uring, zero-copy I/O for the ublk user-space block driver, and initial sub-scheduler (sched_ext) support aimed at better CPU scheduling flexibility [2].
This release also drops support for some legacy architectures, specifically removing Intel i486 CPU support and other old 486-based platforms [2, 3]. The GNU Linux-libre 7.1 release continues efforts to eliminate binary blobs, cleaning up drivers for GPUs, WiFi networking, and device tree files, while expressing regret over the kernel dropping i486 support due to its impact on legacy hardware preservation [3].
Development will now move toward the upcoming merge window as Linux kernel 7.1 begins wide deployment.