Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 7.1 on June 14, 2026, and it is now available for download. The new version brings better hardware support, filesystem and networking changes, and several security improvements.
The headline change is a new NTFS filesystem implementation that has been in the works for four years. This time it ships with full write support backed by delayed allocation, plus iomap and folio integration for better write performance and improved stability. The driver comes with a new set of userspace utilities called ntfsprogs-plus. If you regularly work with NTFS-formatted disks from Linux, this is the reason to look at 7.1.
What’s new in Linux 7.1
On the security side, Linux 7.1 adds a new Landlock access right for pathname UNIX domain sockets through a new LSM hook. It also enables Intel’s FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) by default, improves the amd-pstate and intel_idle drivers for better power management, and extends support for TCG Storage Opal SSC Single User Mode (SUM) in the sed-opal interface.
For filesystems, beyond the new NTFS, the kernel lets exFAT preallocate clusters without zeroing them, which cuts down fragmentation. The CIFS client gains support for the O_TMPFILE option when creating temporary files, and Ceph picks up a complete infrastructure for collecting per-subvolume I/O metrics and reporting them to the MDS. There are also EXT4 and F2FS improvements, plus support for generating and verifying T10 protection information at the filesystem level.
On architectures and hardware: CPU Memory (CMEM) Latency PMU support for NVIDIA Tegra410 SoCs, BPF fsession support on IBM System/390, and seccomp() support on the Alpha architecture. The userspace block driver ublk gains a UBLK_F_SHMEM_ZC flag for zero-copy I/O, BPF lands in the io_uring subsystem, and the DAMON subsystem supports multiple tuning algorithms. Rounding things out are USB/Thunderbolt changes (new USB power supply driver support, dwc3 driver updates) and the usual sound, networking, and AMDGPU/i915 GPU driver improvements.
Who should care
Linux 7.1 matters to anyone who relies on NTFS from Linux, to people after better power management on AMD or Intel laptops, and to admins running Ceph or disk encryption with sed-opal. You can download it from Torvalds’ git tree or from kernel.org, though waiting for it to reach your distribution’s stable repositories is the safer route before updating. If you want to know where all of this started, take a look at the origins of the kernel with version 0.01.
With 7.1 out, the merge window opens for Linux 7.2, expected in mid or late August 2026. The first Release Candidate for public testing arrives in two weeks, on June 28, 2026.
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