Linux 7.1 Released: New NTFS Driver, Intel FRED For Panther Lake, Faster Arc Graphics

Linus Torvalds just released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel and it’s coming a half-day early thanks to his travel plans.

Linux 7.1 is now stable! While a wild release cycle with the growing number of AI/LLm-reported bugs throughout the kernel, it’s releasing today on time. Linux 7.1 has many exciting new features including the new NTFS driver, Intel FRED for better performance on Panther Lake and future CPUs, faster Intel Arc Battlemage graphics, improvements for older AMD Radeon GPUs, and a variety of other improvements. See the Linux 7.1 feature list for the longer list of all the great changes to be found in this now-stable kernel.

Linux 7.1 can be downloaded via Git. So far no customary announcement has been made by Torvalds but will presumably be on the LKML soon.

Onward to Linux 7.2 as another exciting kernel cycle.

Update: Linus Torvalds is now out with his announcement:

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.

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