Linux 7.1: i486 support removed, NTFS rewritten

Linus Torvalds released Linux 7.1 on June 14. Nothing earth-shaking for a point-one, but a few items are worth an admin’s attention.

The headline retirement: support for old 486-class “dinosaur” architectures is gone. If you were somehow still booting a mainline kernel on a 33MHz relic from the late 80s early 90s, that era is over; for everyone else it’s dead code cleared out of the tree.

On the more useful end:

• A completely rewritten NTFS implementation. The kernel’s NTFS story has been a long saga; a fresh driver is the kind of thing worth watching if you mount Windows volumes on Linux boxes — test before you update machines in production.
• BPF support for io_uring (system calls for storage), plus zero-copy I/O for the ublk user-space block driver — both squarely aimed at high-throughput storage and the people tuning it. This means you are able to optimize your calls to storage and reduce overhead. I had to google this one, quite interesting.
• Initial sub-scheduler support in sched_ext (described as incomplete), more swapping improvements, and new clone() flags that make process management a little easier. In short, this means more efficiency and future algorithms to better perform the CPU, according to the workloads or applications you are running on your device.

This isn’t a “drop everything you are doing” upgrade, but it’s the next mainline baseline. If you run NTFS on Linux or use io_uring for storage performance, 7.1 is the release to start testing in a lab — then wait for it to filter into your distro’s kernel rather than chasing the tarball on production.

Sources

• LWN — The 7.1 kernel has been released