Linux 7.1
lore.kernel.org252 points by berlianta 11 hours ago
252 points by berlianta 11 hours ago
Personally, I'm pretty excited for this commit which fixes the slow WiFi I've had with the combination of my ISP's modem/router and my laptop.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/711a9c018ad252b2807...
Hope it gets to Fedora soon!
Looking forward for a new NTFS driver to try. I hope this new iteration will be better than ntfs3 from Paragon.
What is lacking in the previous one? NTFS support in linux is mostly to read and write files from windows disks, right? I think all the NTFS linux drivers - even the fuse one before the Paragon one - have been alright at that.
Ubuntu switched to the Paragon NTFS driver by default. When I upgraded to kernel 6.5 (I think) from Ubuntu, I started getting frequent kernel panics, like every day. Soon, I noticed that I couldn't even compile a Rust project on an NTFS partition because the compiler was getting random file system errors, and compiling was at high risk of causing a kernel panic. The NTFS driver in that kernel version is just totally broken. I switched to the FUSE NTFS-3G, and then I stopped getting panics and can compile stuff again no problem.
Looking at kernel commits, it looks like the driver may have been fixed since, but I'm scared to use it after it had such major brokenness in that version.
The Paragon v3 NTFS driver was in perpetual beta with a scary warning about data loss whenever it was enabled.
I think users moved on when they saw no real harm in continuing to use it.
It’s good. I packaged it in my gentoo overlay and have been using it for a couple months, none of the weird issues ntfs3 had.
Current default for Arch is 7.0.10
Looking forward to 7.1 rolling out soon.
> Linux 7.1 is also notable for its code removals. Driven by AI-assisted bug reporting, ISDN and other old network driver code was removed to avoid that influx of bug reporting against those very rarely touched or used drivers for obsolete hardware.
Moving really old and unused code out of the kernel just to get less AI-assisted bug reports is IMO one of the best consequence ever of AI.
I love it.
We should start trimming the fat out of everything.
This is the sort of thinking that had organizations buying all new desktops because the perfectly working ones they had won't run Windows 11.
I have 10 year old servers I'm still using because they run fine with linux.
The old unmaintained ISDN hardware for which the code has been removed is likely 20 years old, or so. The perfectly good laptops are usually 3-4 times younger.
That's good for your personal computing, but a renewing forest fire is good for all sorts of organizations. And species. It's a very good algorithm to run.
It's naturally de-ossifying and forces uptake of new methods and practices.
It gives you an opportunity to question assumptions and do things greenfield again.
>We should start trimming the fat out of everything.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
One of my buddies was infamous for a while for being the "I deleted X lines of code today" guy.
I remember working with a guy who apparently deleted more code than he added in his time at the company. I think it said more about the codebase than anything but it was good that someone was trying to make it better.
I’ve tried to submit code that removed old drivers from the kernel build in some distros, and they were universally rejected.
Everyone is afraid of breaking users until Torvalds says it’s ok.
> very rarely touched or used drivers for obsolete hardware
I guess end users can not upgrade but a definition of obsolete would be nice.
To me, every HP printer ever is obsolete. But I assume someone else has an equally valid and different opinion. How does that go with computer hardware?
> Moving really old and unused code out of the kernel just to get less AI-assisted bug reports
Obviously, the parent is /s, but when I read this, I thought Linux was removing exploit paths that exercise rarely-used features.
On phone OSes at least, quirky rare formats and features are (were?) a common source of exploitable bugs.
Is the parent really being sarcastic? I read it as genuine.
There’s presumably plenty of code bloat in the kernel, and while no human would ever scan for bugs in a corner of the kernel that hasn’t been used or touched in decades, AI 100% will. And while those bug reports might be useless as bug reports, they seem promising as “why is this code even here?” flags.
I don't mean to be harsh, but if there's a codepath that is exercised on your hardware, but not on mine, I don't think it would be fair for me to deem it as "bloat". There are a TON of supported devices and use cases that are not my own, but are essential to someone else.
Sure, sure. I’m not arguing for removing drivers for uncommon devices, or even rare devices. But there’s a line somewhere. Maybe it’s at “devices that no longer exist.” But I think it’s somewhere before that. And I have no idea how you’d figure out which devices fall where around this hypothetical line. I can only hope that they had good justification for these removals.
If you are still using ISDN you could maintain a fork.
This is one of the main examples of drivers that were removed.
How about we stop adding the fat in the first place. cough. electron. cough.
Presumably that old code was actually useful at the time it was added. It might not be used now, but it helped someone back then. One of the great things about early Linux was that it tried to run on every piece of hardware available. If Linus only wrote drivers (or allowed others to submit drivers) that worked on his personal computer, Linux would have never flourished this far.
Is there anything particularly interesting about this? The first number of the version changes when the second number gets too big, not for any other reason.
LWN merge window part 1 https://lwn.net/Articles/1067250/ Part 2 https://lwn.net/Articles/1067785/
If you have an ad blocker, https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-71-features-changes is a nice summary.
Yeah, my favorite $6 Linux machine is now supported (somewhat). :)
What SoC?
Did anyone see an anime avatar flash by for a fraction of a second before the content loaded? What was that?
Anubis: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
blog post (pretty sure I've seen it on HN before) on the topic:
But not a very accurate blogpost. "Here's why this literally cannot work (in theory)" to denigrate a system that actually works (in practice). Their goal is to convince people to stop using it because it personally inconveniences them, but they never provide an alternative solution that actually solves the problem (in practice) that Anubis actually solves (in practice). If leaving the problem unsolved (in practice) was a desirable option, the site owner would not have turned to Anubis in the first place.
I'm totally out of the loop here, where's the evidence that this works in practice?
before and after apache logs showing much less crap in them from bots. Do you think the maintainers of https://lore.kernel.org/ would leave something in that didn't work? It isn't perfect but I have run it on a (much smaller) web site getting hammered by bots and logged "before" and "after" and the difference is measurable.
uBlock Origin filter to block the anime girl from loading:
! Title: Hide Anubis Image
*/.within.website/x/cmd/anubis/static/img/*.webp$image
Aw, but what have you against kawaii?
For me, it's a personal preference and in my opinion, it's less professional.
Places that want to use Anubis but find the logo not professional enough are free to pay the author, IIRC it was major "professional support" benefit :D
People always seem surprised when someone in CS or SWE doesn't care for anime or cutesy pictorial graphics of girls.
It's mostly surprising how many grown adult men go into a blind rage when confronted with a picture of a cartoon woman. In a lobsters thread about Anubis, a community member of 12 years got themselves permanently banned because they were frothing at the mouth with accusations of pedophilia against the developer and refused to apologise when given an opportunity by moderators. Telling on themselves, perhaps? It's funny, in a bizarre way, that this is a hill people will die on.
It also serves as a sort of "chud defense", in a way.
I like it.
If anything, its the opposite, going by the number of users with anime girl pfps on Twitter and other social media posting slurs and bigotry.
It's moreso only a loose indicator the user is between the ages of 14-30, if anything.
If you don't want the anime girl pay for the support, otherwise you get the anime jackal. Seems like a fair deal to me.
Is it safe to assume we can see this in Debian Stable around 2036?
The most recent Linux kernel releases are: 7.1, 7.0, 6.19, 6.18, …:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history
7.0 is already present in forky (current testing), and available as a backport for trixie (current stable):
* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=linux-image-amd6...
* https://packages.debian.org/trixie-backports/linux-image-amd...
The default kernel for trixie/stable is 6.12, initially released in November 2024, and officially supported upstream until December 2028.
I know it's a bit of a meme but I'm on Debian Stable and I am running the backport kernel, which is on version 6.19. So only one minor version away from the current 7.0.
I wish more people would consider Debian for their devices. It is a very stable system, which I appreciate, and, unlike Ubuntu, it was really an "it just works" experience, without any of the friction points that smaller distros have. I installed Debian Trixie on a very recent device (granted, all AMD for compatibility) when Trixie was still the Testing version, and all the necessary drivers were present.
Now if only I could figure out how to build packages and contribute back to Debian... Also if only AMD could get their NPU support for Linux figured out...
Actually, I'm running the backports kernel which is at 7.0 today.
$ uname --kernel-release
7.0.10+deb13-amd64
I did all of my distro hopping when I was young, 20+ years ago. I settled on Debian because life got busy and I had no time to fuss with broken software updates.
> (granted, all AMD for compatibility)
I get that you mean that AMD is more compatible than... what? Intel? Arm?
I’ll never understand why people like Ubuntu. It’s a really hard toss up for me if I’d rather be stuck with Ubuntu or windows.
Probably because it got popular as the easy Linux distro back in the 2000s and that label is sticking.
I remember that I attempted to install Debian on my laptop in 2009. It was ugly. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and it was a totally different and much nicer experience. Because of that I've been on Ubuntu until they started pushing snaps very aggressively. I live booted Debian 11 and realized that its UI was exactly the same. I don't know when it happened during that dozen of years but there wasn't anymore a reason to stick to Ubuntu. I installed Debian 11 and got a faster machine with less background processes. I'm on Debian 13 now. I've been told that KDE is much better than what I attempted to use in 2014 so maybe I could give it a try, but it's unclear to me what I have to gain.
I prefer KDE (on Ubuntu, because I tried it and it's good enough) - it's got more stuff built into the OS in terms of settings. I tended to find that Gnome needs you to install more things to expose configuration settings, whereas KDE's configuration UI is pretty good.
For me, it was kubuntu. Back in late 2005 or early 2006. The reason? They were always pretty good at shipping the latest KDE. I had grown tired of hoping someone would compile a new version for my preferred distro.
So kubuntu it was, and has been ever since. I'm currently looking into whether I should change to something else - as I've started growing tired of Ubuntu/Kubuntu after some 20 odd years.
I'm of the belief that the more popular an OS is, the more maintainers it will have (and thus less bugs). The only thing about Ubuntu that I hated was its choice of windowing manager. That's why there are so many variants like KUbuntu, XUbuntu, etc. Are there other reasons to not like Ubuntu other than the windowing manager?
> Are there other reasons to not like Ubuntu other than the windowing manager?
Snap applications are still not “equal enough” to installed apps.
They have gotten better, but it’s not seamless and when you get burned it’s 2 hours debugging. Each time.
An app I use/help maintain regularly gets bug reports about sandboxed behavior. It’s understandable but the easiest fix is to install an unsandboxed version.
I personally have some extra steps in my workflow for printing from a snap application because it doesn’t just work and I don’t want to spend the hours needed to debug it.
Ubuntu offered a slightly prettier installation experience.
Sure, no matter which distro you were installing you still had to provide a hostname, a domain name, some IP info (maybe), and an opinion on partitioning - there's only so many ways to ask the user these questions - but the ubuntu installer was prettier.
Around the time it was gaining popularity, almost every 'reviewer' (blogger) seemed to waste about 85% of their distro reviews talking about the installer - as though this was somehow important. The big sell of Debian, and Debian-derivatives, is that you install once, and then it's just in-place upgrades forever. The distro-hoppers, Microsoft evacuees, content-creators, etc - didn't really get that.
Anyway, once Ubuntu was installed it was much the same to operate as a Debian box. Obviously there were some surprising differences. Unity. Mir. One Cloud. Wubi. Upstart. Bazaar.
Come on - at least make one substantive criticism in your post putting down Ubuntu.
I came to Ubuntu because Wine worked on it with no effort. Yes, this was a long time ago. I have certainly cursed some of their changes since then, but I don’t want to spend my time doing yet another sysadmin job, so the less I change the better.
Well, it starts with when I have to opt out of location services during install, and Ubuntu reserving usernames (admin, for example) and ends with how aggressively they shut down upstream repos… if they’re not being DDoSd. Package conflicts are miserable, so they tried to paper over it, adding yet another bullshit layer of things to debug when something invariably breaks.
I’d rather flip the question back on you, how is Ubuntu better than, say, Rocky? If you say “upgrading is easier” I’ll chuckle for the rest of the day.
It’s fairly easy to build your own kernel packages from vanilla sources in Debian. I’m running the latest 7.0.x within a few hours of its release. The build takes about 30-45 minutes depending on how much time I spend on skimming the ChangeLog. YMMV.
> The build takes about 30-45 minutes
If you don't actually need all the drivers, you can use "make localmodconfig" to substantially reduce that. My local kernels build in 90 seconds on a 32-thread desktop machine :)
The kernel is a lot more stable than people think: I run the daily linux-next on my Debian stable gaming PC to look for bugs, and I don't find very many.
I did that for a while because of compatibility issues with a newer laptop, it works but generally if there is no reason it's way easier to stay with the provided packages. Compiling weekly due to security patches becomes annoying over time for no real gain other than the version number
I miss the days when my 486 took about 12 hours to compile a kernel
Or it took >15 minutes to generate PGP 2.x private keys due to entropy generation and prime calculations/tests.
> It’s fairly easy to build your own kernel packages from vanilla sources in Debian.
IIRC, Debian has a command called "make-kpkg" which does nearly all the work for you, ending up with a installable package which works identically to the standard Debian kernel packages.
what about your carbon footprint
I build using excess solar from my house. The build host is a small arm64 SBC that doesn’t require cooling in my passively cooled garage.
The resources behind your post likely have a larger carbon footprint.
Wouldn't Forky/14 have this or newer when it releases next year? Debian moves slow - deliberately so, if you want fast use Arch or Fedora - but it does move.
Yes, best guess is forky will adopt the LTS kernel that will release at the end of this calendar year.
Not a serious question but I'll give a serious answer anyway.
The last time I worried over which kernel was used in Debian Stable was... never. If I want a more recent kernel I run Debian unstable (Sid) which currently is at 7.0.12 (the current 'stable' kernel where 7.1 is 'mainline') but on my servers Stable (currently 'Trixie') does just fine with its 6.17.3 kernel. Debian 'Forky' will be released somewhere in 2027 with either a 7.0.x or 7.1.x kernel depending on how things go. The current kernel used in 'testing' (which will become 'stable' on the next release) is 7.0.10.
People don't usually understand that apt allows you to configure multiple sources across versions simultaneously, so you can e.g. run stable, but also selectively install from backports or unstable.
To do so, add the sources for trixie-backports and unstable, and add the following configuration (e.g. /etc/apt/preferences.d/trixie-sid-pin) so that the system knows which sources your prefer:
# Default to trixie
Package: *
Pin: release n=trixie
Pin-Priority: 990
# Very low priority for sid
Package: *
Pin: release n=unstable
Pin-Priority: 100
# Give backports medium priority
Package: *
Pin: release n=trixie-backports
Pin-Priority: 500
# apt policy linux-image-amd64
linux-image-amd64:
Installed: 7.0.12-1
Candidate: 7.0.12-2
Version table:
7.0.12-2 500
500 http://deb.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages
*** 7.0.12-1 100
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
7.0.10-1~bpo13+1 500
500 http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie-backports/main amd64 Packages
6.12.90-2 500
500 http://security.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security/main amd64 Packages
6.12.86-1 990
990 http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie/main amd64 Packages
> People don't usually understand that apt allows you to configure multiple sources across versions simultaneously, so you can e.g. run stable, but also selectively install from backports or unstable.
Which is just as well, because that's not generally a good idea unless you really know what you're doing:
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_Frank...
Granted, the kernel is probably the best thing to do it with, on account of their aggressive stance on compatibility and the narrowness of impact (no .so files in play).
> The last time I worried over which kernel was used in Debian Stable was... never.
It was briefly a little annoying to deal with wireguard. But it was only a bit annoying, and then they updated. That's the only time I recall specifically caring.
Yes, when that was a thing I just compiled the wireguard module myself to feed it to the virtual router. It was only needed for a short interval and was thereafter handled by dkms, i.e. no problem.
doesn't debian usually stick to LTS kernels? afaik 7.0 was designated as an LTS release so it'll probably be the version that next major release will ship with (next year maybe?)
Breaking: Linus is on travel.
Did I miss something about this or is it just another number?
Yeah, it gets boring when the number change doesn't change and try improving everything at once, but the great thing is that freshness improves driven by number fomo and that tightens the improvement loop.
Exciting and risky things are always under flags, so if you really care you just build, configure, and bench your own kernel+system.
- "Anyway, possible slight hiccups in the merge window aside, the news today is 7.1." - "nothing particularly interesting or scary stands out, which is as it should be."
So, a number.
He's just writing about the changes since last week. Not about 7.1 as a whole. No last minute scary things means 7.1 released as planned.
But 7.1 new features can still be exciting.
Surprised nobody will spring for the inflight WiFi for Linus. Has to be some of the best return per dollar that could be spent!
From 6 to 7
what a legend!