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 device type alias across the driver, clarifying driver and device type naming, and adopting the vertical import style.

Rockchip Platform

Cristian Ciocaltea fixed the reg-names ordering in the Rockchip video decoder device tree bindings for RK3576 and RK3588. The existing binding specification required the registers to be listed out of address order; this ordering has been deprecated in favor of the correct address-based order. The binding was also updated to make reg-names mandatory; it was already required by the driver but not specified in the binding documentation. Cristian added support for the BACKGROUND_COLOR CRTC property in the VOP2 display controller driver, enabling configuration of the background color for each video output port during hardware programming. In the Synopsys DW HDMI QP TX controller library, he added missing HDMI Vendor Specific InfoFrame support (which previously only generated a "HDMI VSI not supported" warning) and enabled SPD InfoFrame support, introducing new internal helpers and reworking the AVI, DRM, and Audio InfoFrame handlers to support this.

Sebastian Reichel added SD/eMMC aliases to the ArmSom Sige5 device tree, so the operating system can assign stable interface names, and added all six SPDIF transmitters to the RK3576 device tree, which are typically used to provide audio support alongside the DisplayPort controller.

Michael Riesch fixed the Rockchip rkcif driver to comply with the minimum number of buffers requirement, accepting exactly one buffer as CIF_REQ_BUFS_MIN requires.

Vignesh Raman added the rk3588-rock-5b board in drm-ci, providing automated test coverage for RK3588 development boards.

MediaTek hardware enablement

AngeloGioacchino Del Regno added the MT7622 Audio power domain to the legacy SCPSYS power domain driver, along with the corresponding dt-bindings for the Audio IPs, resolving dtbs_check warnings in the RFB board and in BananaPi BPi-R64 board devicetrees.

Louis-Alexis Eyraud added MT8189 SoC support to the mtk-sd driver, adding new compatible and platform data, along with SPM resource release control in the suspend callback, and the corresponding dt-bindings. MMC aliases were added to the MT8365-EVK, Radxa NIO-12L, and Genio 1200-EVK device trees so that eMMC and SD card host controllers are enumerated in a consistent order. He fixed non-static global variables in the MediaTek HDMI, DDC, and CEC drivers to silence sparse warnings, and also fixed formatting issues in the MediaTek audsys dt-bindings to resolve make dt_binding_check warnings.

Nicolas Frattaroli implemented `nvmem`-provider functionality in the MT8196-specific MediaTek Flexible Graphics (MFG) power domain driver, exposing the shader_present value as an nvmem cell for Panthor. The corresponding dt-bindings were updated to describe the mediatek,mt8196-gpufreq device as an nvmem provider.

Nícolas F. R. A. Prado fixed MT8365's infracfg-nao devicetree node, which is used by the power domain controller for bus arbitration. The kernel had been attempting to bind the device to the wrong driver due to the wrong "compatible" string being used, with Nicolas adding a new compatible, enabling the device to be properly bound as a syscon.

USB Type-C and connectivity

Sebastian Reichel improved TCPM's handling of DISCOVER_MODES failures by gracefully handling NAKs and continuing to process the remaining modes rather than aborting. He also fixed combo PHYs (USB3 + DisplayPort) that were being referenced twice from the USB-C connector, causing the mux and orientation switch to be configured twice. He also added DRM DP HPD bridge support to the fusb302 driver, enabling fusb302-based USB-C connectors to work with the DP altmode helper code on device tree platforms. This last change is expected to be superseded soon by a generic solution, enabling automatic registration of DRM DP HPD bridges with any DP AltMode-supporting TypeC controller.

Additional improvements

Matthew Leach fixed peer resolution in the ath11k driver for peers assigned peer_id=0. On aggregated links, the mpdu_start header is only populated on the first sub-MSDU, causing subsequent MSDUs to skip peer resolution, receive an incorrect encryption type, and be dropped by ieee80211.

Nícolas F. R. A. Prado fixed a long-standing known bug in Linux, where trying to suspend the system with a Logitech Bolt receiver plugged in would cause it to immediately wakeup. The issue was fixed by setting an HID quirk for the device that makes the kernel continually poll its USB interfaces, preventing the spurious wakeups from happening.

Robert Beckett added a device quirk to disable write-zeroes functionality for Kingston OM3SGP4 NVMe drives. A firmware race condition between concurrent write-zeroes and DSM commands was causing spurious "LBA Out of Range" errors and IOMMU page faults.

Robert also provided a fix to stop the quirk being defeated when wzsl is set, which was unconditionally overriding max_zeroes_sectors. Lastly, Cristian Ciocaltea fixed invalid kernel-doc references for a few LUT properties in the AMD GPU driver.

List of contributions

Below is a full list of contributions made by Collabora for the 7.1 release, as recorded in the git commit history:

Related Posts

From Panthor to RK3588: Advancing graphics, video and SoC support in Linux kernel 7.0

Kernel 6.19: GPU, SoC, and Rust improvements

Kernel 6.18: Tyr advances Rust in Linux

Related Posts

From Panthor to RK3588: Advancing graphics, video and SoC support in Linux kernel 7.0

Kernel 6.19: GPU, SoC, and Rust improvements

Kernel 6.18: Tyr advances Rust in Linux