Linus Torvalds Releases Linux 7.1 and Kills Obsolete Russian Chips
Our favorite benevolent dictator has done it again. While you struggle to write an out-of-office email, Linus Torvalds pushed Linux 7.1 from an airport terminal, sweeping away decades of digital garbage.
Linus Torvalds officially pushed the button for Linux 7.1 on a Sunday afternoon, right before boarding a series of long-haul flights where he will be entirely offline.
This release is a massive spring cleaning of the kernel. The biggest casualty is the ancient Intel 486 architecture, which has finally been sent to the tech graveyard. The kernel developers grew tired of keeping convoluted code alive just to emulate basic CPU instructions for hardware that is probably currently rusting in some high school basement.
On the file system front, Windows users might shed a tear of joy. The kernel introduces ntfsplus, a completely rewritten NTFS driver that promises to make writing data up to 110% faster. It is basically the digital equivalent of giving a turtle a jetpack, though the old driver remains in the kernel just in case someone misses the nostalgic slow-motion writes.
The developer community also continues its slow, inevitable migration toward Rust. The requirements for the Rust compiler have been bumped to version 1.85, bringing minor performance boosts. It is still not enabled by default, keeping the old-school C-purists from having a collective panic attack on the mailing lists.
But the real comedy lies in what got thrown into the trash bin. The kernel officially purged all support for Russia's defunct Baikal-T1 processor and its related controllers. Since the manufacturing of these chips was completely shut down in late 2025, keeping their unmaintained code in the kernel made about as much sense as keeping a manual for a steam engine. Along with it, Torvalds cleared out 140,000 lines of dead code, including ancient Ethernet drivers from 2002 that literally nobody has used in this decade.
Lastly, the obsolete UDP-Lite protocol was completely removed due to a total lack of users, and IPv6 can no longer be compiled as a standalone kernel module.
The Tech Clean-Up We Deserve
Watching a 35-year-old operating system ruthlessly execute its own history is a beautiful sight. While modern software suites bloat up with useless AI search bars, open-source developers are busy burning down the digital hoarders' paradise. Some retro-computing enthusiasts will undoubtedly cry over their lost i486 support, but progress waits for no one—especially not when the chief architect is offline at 35,000 feet.
Source: lore.kernel.org
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