Linus Torvalds released the first Release Candidate of Linux 7.1 on Sunday, April 26, 2026, signaling the close of the two-week merge window and marking the beginning of the stabilization phase for what is shaping up to be one of the more consequential minor releases in recent memory. The stable kernel is expected to arrive in the second half of June 2026.

Two changes dominate the headlines this cycle: a ground-up rewrite of the kernel’s NTFS filesystem driver, and the long-anticipated removal of support for Intel’s 486-class processors — hardware that dates back to 1989.

NTFS Resurrected, Not Just Revised

The most significant technical development in Linux 7.1 is the merging of a completely rewritten NTFS driver, a project four years in the making by developer Namjae Jeon — the same engineer behind Linux’s exFAT driver. Torvalds himself gave the work an evocative label when merging it: he called it the “ntfs resurrection.”

The new driver replaces the kernel’s ancient read-only NTFS code, which had been largely unmaintained. It brings full write support, implements delayed allocation, and integrates modern kernel infrastructure including iomap and folio — features that allow it to behave as a genuine first-class citizen alongside ext4 and Btrfs rather than a compatibility afterthought.

The existing Paragon NTFS3 driver, which was merged a few years ago and has largely stagnated since, will remain in-tree for now. Users who want to try the new driver can enable it via the NTFS_FS Kconfig switch. The Register noted that NTFS3’s days are likely numbered as the new implementation matures.

According to the pull request, every test passed by the old NTFS3 driver is a complete subset of those passed by the new implementation. Additional capabilities include support for fallocate, idmapped mounts, and proper permissions handling. Performance benchmarks are ongoing — Phoronix noted improvements in multi-threaded write scenarios, though final numbers will emerge from community testing in the weeks ahead. Claims circulating online of “4x faster mounting on 4TB drives” should be treated as preliminary until independently verified.

Farewell to the i486: A 37-Year Legacy Ends

The other major departure in this cycle is the removal of i486 CPU support. The Intel 486 processor — introduced in 1989 — has been supported by Linux practically since the kernel’s inception. With the 7.1 merge window now closed, the Kconfig options that enabled building the kernel for 486-class systems (M486, M486SX, ELAN, and related flags) have been removed from the codebase.

The decision has been a long time coming. Kernel maintainer Ingo Molnar noted in the merge request that no known Linux distribution still ships packages with i486 support, and that anyone running such hardware on an upstream kernel “would be incredibly rare.” Torvalds himself had previously remarked that i486-class machines “are mostly kept as museum pieces, and might as well run museum kernels.”

The removal affects not just Intel’s own 486 DX, DX2, and DX4 lines, but also compatible chips from AMD and Cyrix manufactured during that era. Those still running such hardware — a very small population — are advised to remain on one of the existing Long Term Support kernel branches, such as Linux 6.6 LTS.

It is worth noting that the architecture is 37 years old, not 40 as some reports have stated. The Intel 486 launched in 1989; we are in 2026.

Hardware Support & Driver Highlights

Beyond the two headline items, Linux 7.1 brings a broad range of new hardware support. The kernel adds initial enablement for 12 new SoC platforms. On the graphics front, early support lands for Intel’s next-generation Xe3P_LPG and Nova Lake P integrated graphics, while the open-source Nouveau driver gains support for NVIDIA’s GA100 accelerator — the chip that underpins the A100 family of data center GPUs.

Lenovo’s Legion Go handheld gaming device receives driver optimizations in this release, a sign of the kernel community’s growing attention to the handheld PC market. Conversely, a large sweep of obsolete code was cleared out: ISDN drivers, ham radio interfaces, vintage PCMCIA drivers, and support code for Russia’s Baikal CPU family were among the items removed — a cleanup that saw roughly 138,000 lines of code deleted. Despite this, the total kernel source tree continues to grow, now approaching 40 million lines in Git.

Release Timeline

Accuracy Notes

Whether you measure this release by the filesystem milestone, the hardware archaeology, or the sheer volume of changes merged in two weeks, Linux 7.1 is worth watching. RC2 is expected next Sunday. The kernel testing community is encouraged to build and boot — as Torvalds put it, the fact that it works on his machines is a good start, but not the finish line.