Linus Torvalds tagged Linux 7.1 on June 14th, 2026, and the headline feature is one that has frustrated dual-boot users for years: NTFS — the file system on virtually every Windows drive in existence — now has a proper, first-class driver in the mainline kernel.
The NTFS Driver Rewrite
The old ntfs3 driver, merged into the kernel back in 2021, was functional but rough around the edges. Writes were unreliable under certain workloads and mount times were slow. The 7.1 driver is a ground-up rewrite built on modern kernel infrastructure: iomap for I/O mapping, folio-based page management, and delayed allocation for batching writes efficiently.
The result is measurable. Benchmarks show 110% improvement on multi-threaded write workloads compared to the 7.0 driver. Cold mount times are also significantly faster, which matters when you're booting into Linux and need your Windows partition available immediately. A new companion userspace toolkit, ntfsprogs-plus, ships alongside the kernel driver for repair, format, and inspection tasks.
For anyone who has ever had a Windows drive go read-only mid-session on Linux, this is a genuinely big deal.
What Else Landed in 7.1
Intel's FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) mechanism is now enabled by default. FRED replaces the older IRET-based exception handling path with a more efficient design, reducing overhead on interrupt-heavy workloads like database servers and high-throughput networking.
GPU driver improvements are widespread. Intel Arc graphics get faster shader compilation, AMD's AMDGPU driver adds initial Zen 6 support ahead of those processors shipping, and Apple Silicon support continues to mature with better power management on M-series chips running Asahi-derived drivers.
Steam Deck OLED owners will notice audio fixes that address crackling and drop-outs that appeared after kernel 7.0. Those issues stemmed from timing bugs in the CS35L56 amplifier driver, now corrected.
The legacy i486 architecture support is officially gone. It was already broken in 7.0 and nobody noticed, which says everything about how relevant 486-class hardware is in 2026.
Getting It
Major distributions will ship 7.1 on their normal schedules — Fedora will likely be first with an update, followed by Arch and the rolling releases. Ubuntu LTS users are already on 7.0 with Ubuntu 26.04 and will receive 7.1 backports through the HWE stack in the coming weeks. You can also build from source via kernel.org as always.
If you run a dual-boot setup with Windows and have been stuck on an older kernel specifically to avoid NTFS headaches, 7.1 is the version to upgrade to.