Part of running LWN is keeping a list of potentially interesting topics that may merit the effort to turn into articles. As an experiment, we are now exposing that list to our subscribers at the Project Leader and Supporter levels. The hope is that this list will provide useful insights into what is on our radar and which might be coming to LWN in the near future.

With this feature, we hope to give our most committed subscribers a look behind the curtain and the ability to provide input on the topics they are most interested in reading about. There, is, thus, a simple voting mechanism built into this list. No topic will be chosen (or rejected) solely on the basis of votes; there are a lot of considerations that go into topic selection, and that will not change. But more information about where our readers' interests lie will, hopefully, be helpful.

For all readers: we are always happy to welcome topic suggestions sent to lwn@lwn.net.

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.