Linux 7.1 has been tagged and released, closing this development cycle with over 15,000 commits.
This second release in the 7.x cycle brings quite a few noteworthy things: a brand-new NTFS driver, proper battery metrics on MacBook laptops with the Apple SMC driver, and several improvements across the graphics and DRM stack. It also continues the ongoing cleanup of older and unmaintained drivers, dropping support for things like ISDN and ham radio. Notably, Linux 7.1 begins the process for retiring Intel 486 CPU support (“i486”) in the future. For more details and a full list of changes, check the corresponding KernelNewbies page.
As usual, Igalia has been busy contributing fixes and improvements to different areas during this release. Below are some of our highlights from this cycle.
The V3D and VC4 drivers saw several robustness and maintainability improvements this cycle. As part of the Raspberry Pi 5 upstreaming effort, we added the V3D GPU device-tree node for BCM2712, enabling V3D support on fully upstream kernels.
We also continued improving the V3D interface by migrating performance monitor tracking from IDR to XArray in both V3D and VC4. In parallel, a series of fixes addressed reference counting, scheduler integration, cache synchroniztion, and error handling issues in V3D’s compute intrastructure, improving the stability of CPU job execution paths.
On the power-management side, we refined Raspberry Pi firmware clock handling by moving clock rate management into prepare/unprepare callbacks. These changes reduce unnecessary power consumption for clock users and lay the groundwork for V3D Runtime PM support, which will land in the next kernel release.
On the AMD side, we continued our efforts to clean up the user queue submission code. This cycle, we focused on removing resource leaks in the wait and signal ioctls, consolidating exit paths to prevent deadlocks, and ensuring that userspace cannot trivially trigger kernel warnings. These changes improve the overall security and stability of the amdgpu driver when interacting with complex user-space workloads.
We finalized Alderlake support for AuxCCS (Auxiliary Color Compression Support) in the Intel Xe driver. This includes adding support for frame buffer modifiers, ensuring proper invalidation of auxiliary tables, and quiescing memory traffic during cache invalidation. These changes reduce the memory bandwith consumed by UI composition and graphical rendering, improving power efficiency and overall performance on this platform.
Building on the cross-system dma-fence work we did for the 6.17 kernel release, we helped upstream extend this protection to module unload scenarios. We’ve also fixed warnings related to __rcu annotations to keep the codebase clean and static-analysis friendly.
For developers relying on pstore and ftrace, Linux 7.1 brings important fixes. Previously, systems with KASLR enabled would cause offsets saved in debug sessions to be bogus when decoded. This has been fixed along with other pstore improvements, and an improved debugfs interface for the reserve_mem parameter. These changes should provide better visibility into memory reservation states and improve the overall state of these subsystems for debugging kernel crashes or hangs.
Beyond the major subsystem updates, Igalia also helped with several “odd fixes” and general maintenance work to keep the kernel healthy.
In the filesystems area, we fixed a null pointer dereference in JFS during unmount and resolved an uninitialized value issue in the FUSE layer.
For Bluetooth, we reworked the reset path in the HCI core to ensure clean adapter teardown, preventing protocol issues caused by pending work.
On the peripherals side, we implemented proper URB tracking in the libertas Wi-Fi driver to prevent use-after-free issues, and added stricter validation checks for USBTMC endpoints.
We also investigated a data race in the Real Time Clock (RTC) subsystem reported by syzbot and detected by the Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer (KCSAN). The race was determined to be safe, and the code was annotated to prevent future false-positive reports.
Finally, we’ve improved documentation for ttm_bo_swapout and implemented the corresponding KUnit tests.
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