On Sunday it's anticipated that Linus Torvalds will released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel. This is a really terrific mid-year update to the Linux kernel! Here's what makes me excited about Linux 7.1.

In my testing of the Linux 7.1 kernel over the past number of weeks and prior to that all of the monitoring of the merge window and "-next" branches before that, here is what has me the most excited about Linux 7.1:

- The new NTFS file-system driver for those looking forward to a nicer experience when reading and writing to this widely-used Microsoft file-system.

- Intel FRED is now enabled by default for Flexible Return and Event Delivery. FRED allows better performance on Intel Panther Lake as a nice win as I've shown in benchmarks.

- ALso on the Intel performance side, some nice performance improvements for Intel Arc Battlemage graphics. This is both for the consumer graphics cards like the Intel Arc B580 as well as also seeing better performance on the Arc Pro B-Series.

- Some other performance-related work includes more scheduler improvements and enabling more crypto optimizations by default. There is also a fix for a Sheaves performance regression.

- AMDGPU DC support for GCN 1.1 APUs. Those still using AMD Kaveri APUs and similar will now see a better experience when using the latest Linux 7.1 kernel with the AMDGPU graphics driver.

- Mainline ARM kernels now support real-time "RT" kernel builds without any ouf-ot-tree patches for those 32-bit ARM environments.

- Support for the Realtek RTL8157 and other new networking hardware.

- The Lenovo Yoga Fan driver for fan control support across various Lenovo Legion, Flex, Slim, and IdeaPad laptops.

See our Linux 7.1 feature overview for a more comprehensive look at all of the interesting features coming to this next kernel version. If all goes well, Linux 7.1 stable will be out on Sunday, 14 June.

Update: And then after that it's off for the Linux 7.2 merge window and its new features.