Linus Torvalds tagged Linux 7.1-rc2 on Sunday, May 3, 2026, continuing the weekly release candidate cadence for the 7.1 development cycle. The build is available now from the official Linux kernel Git tree at kernel.org.
As with all release candidates, this version is intended for developers and testers only and should not be used on production machines. RC2 follows RC1 by exactly one week, as expected.
The most talked-about addition heading into RC2 is a set of Direct Rendering Manager fixes for older AMD GPU hardware. Valve engineer Timur Kristof submitted a batch of improvements targeting AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era graphics cards, which cover hardware released between 2011 and 2014.
The work enables support for what AMD internally calls “harvested” GPU configurations: chips where certain compute units are disabled at the silicon level, either due to manufacturing defects or deliberate product segmentation.
The Radeon HD 7870 XT is the standout example here.
This card uses the Tahiti LE chip, a harvested variant of the full Tahiti GPU that powers the HD 7970. A bug report filed all the way back in 2013 documented that mainline Linux did not handle this card correctly. More than twelve years later, Timur Kristof’s work finally closes that issue.
With Linux 7.1, the HD 7870 XT Tahiti LE and similar harvested GCN configurations should work properly under the open-source AMDGPU driver stack for the first time in the kernel mainline.
The broader DRM driver batch also includes GFX11.5.4 IP fixes and corrections for newer AMD IP block configurations. These cover hardware on the opposite end of the age spectrum from the GCN work, ensuring that recently shipped silicon also benefits from this week’s fixes alongside the legacy improvements.
To understand why RC2 exists, it helps to know how the 7.1 development cycle is structured.
The merge window for Linux 7.1 opened immediately after Linux 7.0 shipped on April 12, 2026. Over the following two weeks, maintainers submitted their largest patches and new features for the cycle. That window closed with RC1 on April 26, bringing in approximately 13,000 non-merge commits.
From RC1 onward, no new features are accepted. Every weekly RC from this point is purely about bug fixes, regressions, and stabilization work.
RC1 itself arrived with a somewhat inflated patch count. A single bulk AMD GPU register header sync accounted for roughly 25 percent of the entire RC1 diff. Torvalds noted in his announcement that the underlying changes were normal in scale once you removed that vendor sync from the numbers.
The rest of the RC1 work covered driver updates, VFS improvements from Christian Brauner, x86 enhancements around FRED, SEV, and TDX, Rust integration from Miguel Ojeda, and the beginning of a legacy hardware cleanup cycle that removes i486 and obsolete SoC support.
The headline feature that drew the most attention during the merge window remains the rewritten NTFS kernel driver.
Developer Namjae Jeon, who also wrote the Linux exFAT driver, spent four years producing a ground-up rewrite of the kernel’s NTFS implementation. The old in-kernel NTFS driver was read-only and effectively unmaintained. The newer Paragon NTFS3 driver added in Linux 5.15 was faster but has stagnated.
The new driver brings full write support, delayed allocation, iomap integration, support for fallocate and idmapped mounts, and proper permissions handling. Torvalds gave it the label “ntfs resurrection” when merging the pull request, a description that fits. Every test that NTFS3 passes is a subset of what the new driver handles.
For users running AMD hardware from the GCN era, RC2 is worth paying attention to as it moves toward the testing repositories of rolling release distributions.
The Radeon HD 7870 XT fix in particular is the kind of long-standing bug resolution that the kernel community handles better than almost any other software project: a thirteen-year-old issue, documented properly, eventually fixed by someone with both the tooling and the patience to finish it.
The stable release of Linux 7.1 is expected in the second half of June 2026. If the cycle wraps at RC7, the release lands on June 7. An additional RC8, which is common when late regressions surface, would push the date to June 14. According to the announcement, new release candidates will continue to arrive every Sunday until Torvalds judges the tree stable enough to tag the final.
The Linux 7.1-rc2 source is available from Linus Torvalds’s Git tree and as a downloadable tarball at kernel.org.
