After two months of development, Linus Torvalds presented kernel release Linux 7.1. Among the most notable changes: the addition of a new ntfsplus driver, the first stage of deprecation of i486 CPU support, removal of old Ethernet adapters, removal of ISDN and AX.25 protocols, enabling the Intel FRED mechanism by default, support for BPF handlers in io_uring, optimization of the paging subsystem, support for subschedulers in sched_ext, zero-copy I/O in the ublk driver, ioctl operation “shutdown” in Btrfs, dynamic switching of performance mode in the amd-pstate driver, and xattr support for Unix sockets.
The new version includes 17,275 fixes from 2,589 developers. The patch size is 57 MB, with changes affecting 13,528 files. 751,785 lines of code were added, and 405,916 lines were deleted. In comparison, the previous release had 15,624 fixes from 2,477 developers, with a patch size of 56 MB. Approximately 41% of changes in version 7.1 are related to device drivers, 12% to updating code specific to hardware architectures, 14% to the network stack, 5% to file systems, and 3% to internal kernel subsystems.
Main innovations in the 7.1 kernel (1, 2, 3):
- Disk subsystem, input/output, and file systems
- The new version includes a new code-based implementation of the NTFS file system – ntfsplus, while the classic ntfs driver has been removed from the kernel. The new driver offers improved write performance and reduced fragmentation with features like lazy block allocation and the use of folios. The iozone tests show that the ntfsplus driver outperformed the ntfs3 driver in certain scenarios. Additionally, the ntfs3 driver has received corrections and minor improvements.
- Support for integrity check data