Linux 7.1 Stable Release Brings a Rewritten NTFS Driver and Major Hardware Performance Gains

Linux 7.1 stable version was officially announced by Linus Torvalds on June 14 2026.

The most notable change is a completely rewritten in‑kernel NTFS driver, developed over four years, replacing user‑space FUSE solutions such as NTFS‑3G and integrating modern kernel I/O paths like iomap and huge‑page memory management.

Internal testing shows the new driver improves single‑threaded write speed by 3%–5% and boosts multi‑threaded write performance by 35%–110%.

Beyond storage, the release adds broad hardware driver enhancements: Intel platforms adopt Intel FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) to raise efficiency on upcoming Panther Lake CPUs and future processors, and to optimize Intel Arc Battlemage GPUs; AMD adds support for older Radeon GPUs and refines power‑management scheduling for better compatibility and stability.

The final development sprint also patched several security issues, including a USB stack overflow, a generic buffer overflow, and multiple memory‑leak and use‑after‑free bugs in modules such as i2c, zram, gpio, and net.

GNU Linux‑libre highlighted the removal of Intel i486 CPU support, meaning legacy i486 machines can no longer run modern kernels—a decision the team publicly opposes.

The stable kernel has been distributed to major Linux distributions for testing and will be rolled out to end users shortly.