Linux 7.1 Ships a Rewritten In-Kernel NTFS Driver, Enables Intel FRED by Default, and Retires i486 in a 140,000-Line Cleanup
Linus Torvalds tagged Linux 7.1 on June 14, 2026, adding a from-scratch in-kernel NTFS driver, switching Intel FRED to opt-out, and deleting roughly 140,000 lines of legacy code.
Editor's Note ·
- Clarification:
- Three of the five cited sources fall outside The Machine Herald's source allowlist: linuxteck.com, it-connect.tech, and computingforgeeks.com. All three were captured live (HTTP 200) and every claim attributed to them was verified verbatim against the snapshots, and the lead facts are independently corroborated by the two allowlisted sources (The Register and Linuxiac); readers should nonetheless note that these three outlets are not yet on the approved allowlist.
Overview
Linus Torvalds tagged the mainline Linux 7.1 kernel on June 14, 2026, according to ComputingForGeeks. The release headlines a from-scratch in-kernel NTFS filesystem driver, flips Intel’s Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) mechanism from opt-in to opt-out on supported hardware, and retires the i486 sub-architecture as part of a cleanup that removes roughly 140,000 lines of legacy code, as reported by IT-Connect.
The merge window drew 12,996 non-merge changesets from 2,011 developers, 342 of whom were sending their first patch, according to ComputingForGeeks. In his release note, Torvalds wrote that “Nothing particularly interesting or scary stands out, which is as it should be,” as quoted by LinuxTeck.
This is the first major release of the 7.x series since Linux 7.0, previously reported by The Machine Herald when it shipped in April with stable Rust support and the sched_ext scheduler framework.
A New NTFS Driver, Four Years in the Making
The biggest single change in 7.1 is a brand-new in-kernel NTFS filesystem, according to ComputingForGeeks. The driver was written by kernel developer Namjae Jeon, who is already the author of the exFAT driver, as reported by IT-Connect. According to The Register, Jeon started the modernization work around 2021 before the driver was merged into kernel 7.1.
The new implementation adds full write support built on the kernel’s iomap layer, with delayed allocation and folio conversion, according to Linuxiac. The same source reports the driver also supports fallocate, idmapped mounts, and permissions, and ships alongside a userspace utility suite called ntfsprogs-plus that includes fsck-related tools.
On testing, the new NTFS driver passes 326 xfstests, compared to 273 for NTFS3, according to The Register. IT-Connect reports the driver delivers significant performance gains, with IT-Connect citing a 110% improvement on multi-threaded writes and noting that drives will also mount much faster.
The addition does not displace the existing drivers immediately. The existing read-only NTFS driver and the separate NTFS3 driver remain in the kernel tree, according to Linuxiac. The Register frames the new code as a long-term replacement, noting that Paragon’s NTFS3 driver will initially remain in the kernel, though “its days are now numbered,” according to The Register.
That outlet also recounts the format’s long history on Linux: the kernel gained NTFS read capability in version 2.1.74 in 1997, and Paragon donated a read-write GPL driver that entered kernel 5.15 in 2021 after months of refactoring, but maintenance became problematic within six months, according to The Register.
Intel FRED Becomes the Default
In Linux 7.1, FRED switches from opt-in to opt-out on hardware that supports it, according to ComputingForGeeks, which notes Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” chips among the platforms that benefit on I/O-heavy workloads. According to LinuxTeck, FRED is an architectural redesign of CPU exception and interrupt handling that reduces overhead on Panther Lake and newer Intel platforms.
Cutting 140,000 Lines and Two Breaking Networking Changes
The release retires the i486 sub-architecture and cuts roughly 140,000 lines of legacy code, according to ComputingForGeeks. LinuxTeck and IT-Connect both identify the removed x86 486-era configurations as M486, M486SX, and ELAN. ComputingForGeeks reports the cleanup also drops PCMCIA host-controller drivers, the ATM networking stack, the ax25 amateur-radio stack, and ISDN, and that RISC-V loses execute-in-place support.
Two networking changes will affect administrators upgrading existing systems. UDP Lite support is gone, and IPv6 can no longer be compiled as a loadable module, meaning it must now be built directly into the kernel or disabled, according to IT-Connect.
Security, Filesystems, and Graphics
Linux 7.1 adds a new Landlock access right that governs connecting to pathname-based UNIX domain sockets, according to ComputingForGeeks. The Landlock module takes advantage of a new socket hook to offer additional policy options, according to IT-Connect.
On the filesystem side, exFAT now supports pre-allocation via fallocate(), according to IT-Connect, which LinuxTeck describes as letting exFAT preallocate clusters without zeroing to reduce file fragmentation. For graphics, the release brings Intel Xe driver optimization for Arc Battlemage hardware and AMDGPU DC support for AMD GCN 1.1 APUs, according to LinuxTeck.
What We Don’t Know
The long-term timeline for retiring NTFS3 in favor of the new driver has not been published; The Register’s characterization that its “days are now numbered” is not accompanied by a removal target. The kernel’s downstream availability also depends on individual distributions choosing to ship 7.1, which the cited sources do not detail.