Kernel 7.1: Graphics, Rust, and SoC Improvements
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Kernel 7.1: Graphics, Rust, and SoC Improvements
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17/06/2026<br>-->
Posted on 17/06/2026 by Vignesh Raman
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Kernel 7.1: Graphics, Rust, and SoC Improvements
Posted on 17/06/2026 by Vignesh Raman<br>--><br>Vignesh Raman<br>June 17, 2026
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Linux kernel 7.1 has been released, bringing with it driver improvements, SoC enablement, and continued progress across graphics and Rust subsystems.
Some highlights from this release include:
NTFS filesystem completely rewritten with full write support
Three new flags to the clone3() system call
Over 140,000 lines of obsolete networking drivers removed, motivated by LLM-driven security bug reports
Extended scheduler class gains per-cgroup sub-scheduler support
Long-standing control group memory retention bug fixed
For a complete overview of what landed in this release, please refer to LWN's merge window summaries:
The first half of the 7.1 merge window
The rest of the 7.1 merge window
This release brings 65 patches from 16 Collabora engineers, spanning graphics drivers, Rust, Rockchip and MediaTek hardware enablement, USB Type-C improvements, and more. Beyond those authored patches, many other Collabora engineers were active across the tree as maintainers, reviewers, testers, and reporters. Let's take a look!
Display and graphics
The Panthor Mali GPU driver saw several Collabora engineers' contributions accepted this cycle. Boris Brezillon fixed a locking race in the GEM LRU subsystem by moving the LRU lock into drm_device, eliminating the need to dereference gem->lru before acquiring the lock. He also fixed PMD entries in drm/shmem_helper not being upgraded to writeable and corrected Panthor's fence initialization check to use dma_fence_was_initialized() following an upstream dma-buf API change.
Adrián Larumbe fixed Panthor's VM-locked region handling during remap operations to ensure it always covers a superset of the original range. He also updated the function documentation to reflect that vm can no longer be NULL.
Nicolas Frattaroli added two tracepoints to Panthor: one for job IRQ events from the Mali CSF firmware (which helps debug cases where GPU job events aren't processed quickly enough), and one for hardware utilization changes. He also reworked the IRQ helpers to add a spinlock covering both the mask member and register, introduced enable_events/disable_events helpers, and replaced the panthor_irq::suspended bool with a proper state enum to correctly handle overlap between the threaded IRQ handler and suspend. A follow-up build fix was also added to ensure the tracepoint headers are found correctly at compile time.
Cristian Ciocaltea added a new standard BACKGROUND_COLOR DRM mode property, which can be attached to a CRTC, allowing display controllers to render a solid color for pixels not covered by any plane or visible through transparent regions of upper planes. This reduces memory bandwidth in common cases, like compositors drawing a solid background behind smaller planes. Companion uAPI helpers were provided to pack/unpack the individual components of the 64-bit ARGB format, which also required exposing DIV_ROUND_CLOSEST() macro to userspace. Additionally, he wired up the generic VKMS driver to make use of this CRTC property when filling the background during blending, defaulting to solid black with the alpha component ignored.
Caterina Shablia added the ARM interleaved 64k modifier, primarily intended to be used by panvk to implement sparse partially-resident images. This results in better map and unmap performance, compared to U-interleaved, with comparable access performance.
Dmitry Osipenko performed regular co-maintenance of virtio-gpu and hdmi-rx kernel drivers. The virtio-gpu driver now allows importing external dmabufs backed by guest memory (udmabuf, for example) with 3D acceleration enabled, allowing developers to implement new multimedia paravirtualization workflows.
On the testing side, Vignesh Raman migrated Qualcomm baremetal drm-ci jobs to LAVA and made the adaptations needed to keep drm-ci in sync with Mesa CI changes.
Rust
Daniel Almeida continued advancing Rust support in the DRM subsystem. He added ARef support for both regular and delayed work items, with corresponding dispatch support in drm::Device. This sets the stage for Tyr to handle work items that require access to the DRM device.
Deborah Brouwer contributed three cleanups to the in-development drm/tyr Rust DRM driver — switching to the DRM...