Linus Torvalds tagged Linux 7.1-rc3 on Sunday, May 10, 2026, keeping the weekly release candidate schedule firmly on track. The build is available now from the official kernel Git tree at kernel.org.
As always, this version is strictly for developers and testers and should not be run on any production system. RC3 arrived with a notable observation from Torvalds himself.
In his announcement on the Linux kernel mailing list, Torvalds noted that the larger-than-usual cycle size seen in RC1 and RC2 is not going away. He described it plainly: the bigger patch volumes are not a side effect of the .0 release.
They look like the new normal. Developers and distribution maintainers tracking this cycle should factor that in when planning stabilization timelines. Networking dominates this week’s patch set.
Around a third of the entire RC3 diff touches the networking subsystem, split across both the core networking stack and the driver layer. This is a notably high ratio for a stabilization-phase RC, where most activity tends to shift toward targeted bug fixes rather than broad subsystem work.
Torvalds noted the split himself in the announcement but did not flag it as a concern. The networking work represents a mix of regression fixes, driver corrections, and incremental hardening rather than new feature additions.
The headline addition from the non-networking side is Intel’s enablement of Auto Counter Reload for Xeon Diamond Rapids processors.
Auto Counter Reload, shortened to ACR, is a hardware performance monitoring feature that automatically reloads a counter value after an overflow event, rather than requiring software intervention to reset it.
In practice, this reduces the overhead of high-frequency performance profiling on Diamond Rapids systems. Engineers using perf or similar profiling tools on Diamond Rapids servers will benefit from this once distributions ship kernels based on the 7.1 release.
Diamond Rapids is Intel’s next-generation Xeon server platform, built on Intel’s 18A process node and positioned as the successor to Granite Rapids. Linux support for Diamond Rapids hardware has been arriving in pieces across recent kernel cycles, and the ACR enablement in 7.1-rc3 is one more component of that bringup work landing through the normal development process.
The rest of RC3 follows the expected pattern for this stage of the cycle.
Bug fixes and regression corrections from the merge window cover architecture, filesystem, and driver layers. The security fix queue also feeds into this build, addressing issues flagged since RC2.
None of the individual fixes carry the same headline weight as the networking volume or the ACR addition, but that is normal for an RC3. The cycle is in the phase where the goal is narrowing down the list of known issues rather than landing new capabilities.
Looking at the broader 7.1 picture, the cycle continues to carry significant work from the merge window. The rewritten NTFS driver from Namjae Jeon remains the most discussed feature addition of the cycle, bringing full write support, delayed allocation, and iomap integration to a long-neglected part of the kernel.
The NTFS rewrite is in place and not changing at this point. RC3 and the builds that follow it are about stabilizing around it rather than extending it.
The Linux 7.1 final release is expected on June 7, 2026, if the cycle wraps at RC7, or June 14 if an additional RC8 is needed. RC3 arriving cleanly and on schedule keeps both dates within reach. The next release candidate will follow on Sunday, May 17, 2026.
The Linux 7.1-rc3 source is available from Linus Torvalds’s Git tree and as a downloadable tarball from kernel.org.
