Linux 7.1 released as Torvalds runs the merge window from the road

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 7.1 on Sunday, June 14, 2026, in a message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. The release arrived "at the regular time - just not in the regular timezone", he wrote: the announcement went out on Sunday afternoon where he was travelling, rather than the Sunday morning he would normally have at home.

A quiet final week

The shortlog for the last week before the release holds no surprises, Torvalds said. Nothing "particularly interesting or scary" stands out, which he described as it should be. The bulk of the changes are smaller driver updates for graphics, networking, sound and miscellaneous hardware, together with fixes in networking and tracing tooling.

Among the entries are heap overflow fixes in the io_ti USB serial driver, a use-after-free fix in zram, stale stack leak fixes in the netfilter nft_fib and nft_meta_bridge modules, and a set of bounds checks in the Thunderbolt and RDMA code. A large batch of fixes from Gabriele Monaco targets the kernel's runtime verification (rv) framework and its tracing tools. Wolfram Sang also used the cycle to hand over I2C maintenance to Andi Shyti.

Merge window on an irregular schedule

The 7.2 merge window opens on Monday, but Torvalds warned that its timing will be uneven. He will be in yet another timezone by then, and long flights without internet will limit how much he can pull. To compensate, he has already fetched the early pull requests, so part of the work can be done offline.

He briefly considered extending the 7.1 cycle by a week and decided it was not worth it, adding that he may come to regret the decision. He also asked developers to keep testing despite the release, and apologised in advance for slower or unpredictable merge-window responses over the next few days.