Probably the biggest change of the Linux 7.1 kernel series is a new NTFS file system implementation, which has been in the works for the last 4 years, featuring full write support with delayed allocation, iomap, and folio integration to improve write performance, better stability, and a new suite of userspace utilities called ntfsprogs-plus.

Linux kernel 7.1 also introduces a new Landlock access right for pathname UNIX domain sockets, thanks to a new LSM hook, improvements to the amd-pstate and intel_idle drivers for better power management, and support for the exFAT file system to preallocate clusters without zeroing to reduce file fragmentation.

Among other changes, Linux kernel 7.1 enables Intel’s Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) feature by default, introduces CPU Memory (CMEM) Latency PMU support for NVIDIA Tegra410 SoCs, adds BPF fsession support for the IBM System/390 architecture, and adds seccomp() support to the Alpha architecture.

Also worth mentioning is that the ublk user-space block driver received a UBLK_F_SHMEM_ZC feature flag for zero-copy I/O, the CIFS client file system received support for the O_TMPFILE option to create temporary files, and the Ceph file system now has a complete infrastructure for per-subvolume I/O metrics collection and reporting to the MDS.

On top of that, Linux kernel 7.1 adds support for generating and verifying T10 protection information at the file system level, extends support for TCG Storage Opal SSC Single User Mode (SUM) in the sed-opal kernel interface, implements BPF support into the io_uring subsystem, and adds support for multiple tuning algorithms to the DAMON subsystem

I don’t understand what any of this means, but this is good I guess