Linux 7.1 Features: New NTFS Driver, New Intel + AMD Hardware, Performance Optimizations & Modernization
Linux Storage:
- ARM64 NEON-accelerated CRC64-NVMe for much better performance.
- Revamping T10 PI data integrity handling for better read performance.
- Introduction of the new NTFS file-system driver that aims to provide better performance and capabilities than existing kernel and FUSE-based NTFS file-system driver options.
- Meanwhile Paragon's NTFS3 kernel driver saw some fixes and minor changes.
- The exFAT driver is reducing file fragmentation and bringing various fixes.
- Fixes for XFS, EXT4, and F2FS this cycle with no major standouts there.
- Data integrity hardening for the JFS file-system.
- RAID fixes and IO_uring enhancements.
- Many fixes for the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers.
Networking:
- The Intel IRDMA driver adds support for new "GEN4" hardware.
- Removing ISDN, ham radio, and other old network drivers that lightens the kernel by 138 thousand lines of code. This removal was motivated by AI-driven bug reports yielding an uptick in bug reporting against these seldom-used drivers.
- Retiring of UDP-Lite code as in turn will allow for better performance of the networking code that is modern and staying.
- IPv6 support can no longer be built as a standalone module.
- Many Mediatek MT76 WiFi driver improvements.
- Support for the RTL8157 5Gbit and RTL8125cp ASICs and other new networking hardware support.
Linux 7.1 On Laptops:
- The Lenovo Yoga Fan driver for fan control support on various Lenovo laptops not only from the Yoga family but also some Legion, Flex, Slim, and IdeaPad laptops too.
- Apple SMC power driver for reporting battery/power metrics for modern MacBooks using the M-series SoCs.
- Linux 7.1 sound code adds support for bus keepers as a step toward better audio support on Apple Silicon hardware.
- Improved Trackpoint doubletap handling for ThinkPads.
- The new Bitland MIFS WMI driver for Chinese laptops to support ACPI platform profiles, hardware monitoring, keyboard backlight, and other features.
- More features for TUXEDO Computers laptops and the Uniwill OEM on the mainline Linux 7.1 kernel.
- Various other x86 platform driver improvements.
Other Hardware:
- Fixing audio support for the Steam Deck OLED after being broken the past two years when using the mainline kernel.
- Suspend/resume support for some old legacy ISA sound card drivers.
- Various USB device additions.
- Audio support for the Line6 POD HD PRO and NexiGo N930W webcam.
- Removing obsolete bus mouse support.
- Removing some obsolete PCMCIA drivers.
- New Lenovo Legion Go drivers are now mainline for benefiting those gaming handhelds.
- There is also support for more Sony Rock Band hardware via the HID driver code.
- Sensor monitoring for more ASUS motherboards under Linux.
- New media drivers made it to the mainline kernel from additional RealSense 3D depth cameras to some NVIDIA Tegra additions.
- The PCIe M.2 power sequencing driver to support M.2 Key-E connectors.
Other Linux 7.1 Changes:
- Removing the old IBM PC110 touchpad driver.
- Via the staging pull, many developers made their very first contributions to the Linux kernel this cycle.
- The ability to reset the hung task detector counter without needing to reboot the system. The /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_detect_count file can now be manually zeroed out if desired.
- A wide variety of memory management changes, some of which can benefit performance.
- Scheduler improvements that also may help some workloads.
- An overhaul to the high resolution timer "HRTIMER" code.
- The Linux 7.1 crypto code is enabling more optimizations by default.
- Merging the MMC subsystem changes that had been rejected from the Linux 7.0 merge window.
- Fixing a Sheaves performance regression.
- Child auto-reap and PIDFD auto-kill flags for the clone3() system call.
- Removing unnecessary memory clobbers.
- user.* xattrs on sockets as a feature initially sought after by GNOME and systemd developers.
- Rust is bringing an experimental option to help with performance around inlining helpers.
- Raising the minimum required Rust version.
Stay tuned for more Linux 7.1 benchmarking over the coming weeks on Phoronix.
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