Linux 7.1-rc3 Released With Many Networking Changes

Linus Torvalds just issued the third weekly test candidate of the Linux 7.1 kernel with around a third of the patches being for the networking subsystem.

One of the few notable merges this week on my radar was Intel enabling Auto Counter Reload “ACR” for Xeon Diamond Rapids. The rest of the work this week revolved around the usual bug and regression fixes plus the security fixes as well.

Linus Torvalds wrote of 7.1-rc3:

“It’s Sunday afternoon, and we all know what that means: Mother’s Day.

But also your regularly scheduled kernel release candidate.

And I think this answers the “is 7.1 continuing the larger size pattern that we saw with 7.0?” question, and the answer is yes: that wasn’t a fluke brought on by a .0 release – it simply seems to be the new normal.

This time around, about a third of the patch is networking – both on the driver side and in core. And related selftests.

The rest is pretty spread out, with other drivers (sound and gpu being the bigger ones, but there’s a little bit of everything in there), architecture updates (powerpc and x86, but also some loongarch and parisc), and various other fixes (smb updates, various core kernel updates, Rust infrastructure, selinux, documentation etc).”

See our Linux 7.1 features/changes overview to learn about all the notable changes coming for Linux 7.1 stable, which should be out by mid June.