Linux kernel 7.1-rc7 was released on the evening of June 7th, Eastern Time. Although the scale of changes is still relatively large in the late release cycle, it has converged compared with the previous candidate version. Kernel maintainer Linus Torvalds said that the current progress makes him confident that the stable version of Linux 7.1 will be officially released next week. If there are no unexpected problems, the release time is expected to be June 14. Compared with previous versions, the overall patch volume of 7.1 is relatively high. This is mainly due to the increased use of AI/large model encoding agents in recent years, which has pushed up the number of patch submissions. However, the change trend has gradually slowed down in recent weeks.
In the update that was merged into 7.1-rc7 this week, one of the more concerning changes was the disabling of a DRM ioctl interface developed by AMD for ROCm CRIU due to ongoing security considerations to reduce related security risks. In addition, in terms of AMD processor support, Linux 7.1-rc7 further adds more Zen 6 processor models to improve the identification support of the new generation of CPUs.
Torvalds pointed out in the 7.1-rc7 announcement released that day that this candidate version is "not small," but the size of each candidate version is indeed gradually shrinking. Among them, GPU-related fixes are currently the largest change, and the amount of network subsystem fixes is also closely followed. In addition, this release also includes some architectural-level fixes (mainly related to KVM), several random driver fixes, some file system changes, and build problem fixes for special configurations. He said that no "terrible problems" have been found that will delay the entire release cycle.
Torvalds also mentioned that he will have some travel factors in his schedule, but they will not be enough to affect the normal release rhythm of Linux 7.1, so he will not consider adjusting the release schedule for the time being. He said that based on the current situation, rc7 should be the last candidate version of this version, but he still reminded developers and users to actively test rc7 in the next week in order to promptly discover potential problems that may affect the official version.
If no major issues are exposed during subsequent testing, the final stable version of Linux 7.1 is expected to be officially released next week. For this upcoming kernel version, new features and important changes can be found in the existing Linux 7.1 feature overview, which covers the main update highlights of this version in multiple subsystems and hardware support.
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