KernelNewbies:

Linux 7.1 has been released on Sun, 14 June 2026.

Summary:

1. Prominent features

1.1. Intel FRED enabled by default

FRED (Fast Return and Event Delivery) is a new architecture on newer Intel processors that defines simple new transitions that change privilege level (ring transitions). It is a replacement for IDT event delivery on x86 and addresses most of the technical nightmares which IDT exposes, improving overall performance and response time.

This feature is supported on Linux since Linux 6.9. This release enables it by default.

1.2. New clone3() flags, for better pidfd-based process management

This release adds three new flags to the clone3(2) system call:

Recommended LWN article: As ye clone(), so shall ye AUTOREAP

1.3. BPF-powered io_uring

The io_uring interface allows to asynchronously do I/O requests. There is still, however, a need to switch to userspace in order to process the results. This release introduces a way to override the standard io_uring_enter(2) syscall execution with an extendible event loop, which can be controlled by BPF via new io_uring struct_ops or from within the kernel.

Recommended LWN article: BPF comes to io_uring at last

1.4. Easier container management with new flags to fsmount(2), clone3(2) and unshare(2)

This release adds FSMOUNT_NAMESPACE flag to fsmount() that creates a new mount namespace with the newly created filesystem attached to a copy of the real rootfs. This returns a namespace file descriptor instead of an O_PATH mount fd, similar to how OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE works for open_tree().

This allows creating a new filesystem and immediately placing it in a new mount namespace in a single operation, which is useful for container runtimes and other namespace-based isolation mechanisms. This accompanies OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE and avoids a needless detour via OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE to get the same effect. Will be especially useful when you mount an actual filesystem to be used as the container rootfs.

This release also adds support for creating a mount namespace that contains only a clone of the root mount, with none of the child mounts: CLONE_EMPTY_MNTNS in clone3(), and UNSHARE_EMPTY_MNTNS for unshare(2).

2. Core (various)

3. File systems

4. Memory management

5. Block layer

6. Tracing, perf and BPF

7. Virtualization

8. Cryptography

9. Security

10. Networking

11. Architectures

12. Drivers

12.1. Graphics

12.2. Power Management

12.3. Storage

12.4. Drivers in the Staging area

12.5. Networking

12.6. Audio

12.7. Tablets, touch screens, keyboards, mouses

12.8. TV tuners, webcams, video capturers

12.9. Universal Serial Bus

12.10. Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)

12.11. Watchdog

12.12. Serial

12.13. CPU Frequency scaling

12.14. Device Voltage and Frequency Scaling

12.15. Voltage, current regulators, power capping, power supply

12.16. Pin Controllers (pinctrl)

12.17. Multi Media Card (MMC)

12.18. Memory Technology Devices (MTD)

12.19. Industrial I/O (iio)

12.20. Multi Function Devices (MFD)

12.21. Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C + I3C)

12.22. Hardware monitoring (hwmon)

12.23. General Purpose I/O (gpio)

12.24. DMA engines

12.25. Cryptography hardware acceleration

12.26. PCI

12.27. Clock

12.28. PHY ("physical layer" framework)

12.29. EDAC (Error Detection And Correction)

12.30. Various

13. List of Pull Requests

14. Other news sites

KernelNewbies: Linux_7.1 (last edited 2026-06-25 17:19:52 by diegocalleja)