Linus Torvalds released the 7.1 kernel as expected on June 14. This development cycle brought in a lot of new features — and a lot of new developers as well. The time has come for our traditional look at where the changes in 7.1 came from, with a digression into how our community may be changing in general.

Linus has released the 7.1 kernel. "So it's only Sunday morning back home, but it's Sunday afternoon where I am right now, so I'm doing the 7.1 release at the regular time - just not in the regular timezone."

Significant changes in 7.1 include the removal of support for some old 486-based architectures, some new clone() flags making process management easier, BPF support for io_uring, zero-copy-I/O support for the ublk user-space block driver, initial (incomplete) sub-scheduler support in sched_ext, more swapping improvements, a completely rewritten NTFS implementation, and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) for details.

The Linux kernel has long tried to use huge pages as a way to improve performance, sometimes with more success than others. The size of huge pages has traditionally been imposed by the hardware, which typically only offers a couple of relatively large options. In more recent times, though, the use of multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs), with more flexible sizing implemented in software, has been growing. If all goes well, the 7.2 development cycle will include the addition of a new feature, contributed by Nico Pache, to make the use of mTHPs even more transparent.