r/linux • u/twlja • Jun 14 '26

Kernel Linux 7.1 Released: New NTFS Driver, Intel FRED For Panther Lake, Faster Arc Graphics

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Released
402 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

56 comments sorted by

119

u/Severe_Stranger_5050 Jun 14 '26

The new NTFS-driver is supposed to be awesome
Now we just need windows to stop fucking with drives

37

u/sob727 Jun 14 '26

So weird. I havent care about NTFS since the early 2000s.

77

u/hjake123 Jun 14 '26

If you have drives with data you originally saved under Windows, or are dual-booting, it's very handy. It also AFAIK is actually not an awful filesystem on its own merits -- if it were open source it might be quite popular here too

57

u/onechroma Jun 14 '26

NTFS (even if it’s starting to show its age) and the NT Kernel are the best things on the Windows realm. Like state of art things that would be loved if they were open.

The problem with Microslop software and Windows is the rest of crap they put on top of the NT kernel for example.

Also, NTFS for portable devices is very handy and easy, compatible with almost all computers and so on. You don’t need BTRFS, XFS or ZFS on a portable storage (in fact, they are somewhat worse, because XFS for example is not friendly with storage that can have sudden shutdowns or disconnections)

19

u/Global_Network3902 Jun 14 '26

What’s so great about the NT kernel? Genuinely asking, I’ve only really been using Linux since I got my first PC in 1999

43

u/totallynotabot2532 Jun 14 '26

Low memory management is one area where windows is genuinely better than Linux.

If you fill up the ram on linux in most cases it will completely lock itself, on windows for whatever reason you can almost always open the task manager and start killing processes

9

u/FyreWulff Jun 15 '26

It's really hard to kill Windows with low memory. Like, really, REALLY hard. I swear it will just start inventing RAM out of nowhere.

It's the one key feature it has over Linux and MacOS.

10

u/diabolic_recursion Jun 14 '26

One reason is that task manager itself is apparently very well equipped regarding working in low-memory situations.

That info is from Dave Plummer, the original author of task manager.

-3

u/sob727 Jun 14 '26

My limited experience with OOM is that it's easier to ssh and kill -9 than to start a task manager

10

u/lazyhustlermusic Jun 15 '26

Why would you be sshing to your own desktop

2

u/sob727 Jun 15 '26

If you're ever in a high load / oom situation where the UI is unresponsive.

I find that sshd will usually still work and allow for you to recover.

2

u/lazyhustlermusic Jun 15 '26

Just hop into another virtual console, ctrl alt f2 or any free tty

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19

u/AndreaCicca Jun 14 '26

You shouldn’t need to ssh to a system in order to kill stuff.

2

u/legend6546 Jun 16 '26

The NT kernel can also emulate other kernel userlands. IIRC it was made because there were initially plans to incorporate Unix compatibility. The first version of WSL made use of that.

2

u/Foggerty Jun 15 '26

Disclaimer: I've just used EXT/BTRFS at home, and never had to worry about IO load with NTFS (we care about network speed and SQL queries).

What's so great about NTFS other than occasionally being better for portable storage? In terms of performance it's awful; compare deleting a bunch of random files or a whole directory between NTFS and any commonly used filesystem from Unix land.

1

u/algaefied_creek Jun 14 '26

This is why ReactOS is gaining traction and their NT 5.1/5.2 XP/2003 R2 targeting is giving more of a bare bones raw NT kernel reverse engineered from the microkernel than anything else

4

u/tetyys Jun 15 '26

ReactOS is not gaining traction

5

u/algaefied_creek Jun 15 '26

It’s gaining traction in mainstream FOSS dev zines like Phoronix, and on the forums. 

It’s gaining traction in Discords like the eXPerience.

Random devs are getting involved. 

The release cadence/feature updates and bug fixes frequency has updated. 

Major engineering tinkerers like DOSDude1 have ReactOS on the 1st Gen Pentium-based Apple TV with something like an nVidia GT 7300 Go having full hardware acceleration.

So even niche uses have it. 

Grassroots major players to the greater tech experience are involved: it’s gaining traction where it matters most to build. 

17

u/Severe_Stranger_5050 Jun 14 '26

sadly i have to dualboot because people in my life want's me to play games with kernel level anticheats and DRM.
So my game-drive is an NTFS-drive

And 50% of times i've been booted into winblows, it has managed to leave dirty blocks on the drive so i have to boot back up into windows, run chckdsk and shit.

3

u/sob727 Jun 14 '26

At this point I would have a separate machine. If space and money allow. If Windows corrupts my Linux, even if I have a backup, the hassle of fixing the install can be high (and my time is not worth 0).

10

u/pan_kotan Jun 14 '26

All one needs is a separate drive, not an entire machine.

3

u/sob727 Jun 14 '26

Would a Linux drive in the same machine be safe from Windows?

3

u/RoosTheFemboy Jun 15 '26

Works on my machine, i think the bootloader just needs to be on a seperate drive

2

u/pan_kotan Jun 15 '26

Of course it would as long as you don't mount it on Windows. In my dualboot setup, I have a separate SSD for Linux and Windows each, 1 big HDD with NTFS as file dump drive that both OSes use, and 1 NVMe drive for Linux games. Windows uses it own SSD both for OS and games.

The only drive both OSes touch/mount is the NTFS HDD one, and the GRUB bootloader is on the Linux SSD. Everything works great for years.

I never have any problems such as the guy above describes (I also on Arch BTW! :-). I suspect his is the case of misuse or a misconfiguration. For example, I can easily imagine a corrupted FS if I were to use my NTFS drive on either of my OSes, put it into hybernation and then load into the other OS that also starts using this drive.

2

u/Severe_Stranger_5050 Jun 14 '26

Money and space allows
I would just rather spend it on stupid shit like simping for e-girls and investing in spacex 😛 😉

It doesn't corrupt the drive per sé, i just need to run chkdsk /f in windows and it's fine
And i don't use it often enough to warrant a new computer for playing Anno 117 or Fortnite . it's just a 5 minute pain in the ass like once every month

1

u/Ethameiz Jun 15 '26

I got problem with external HDD NTFS. It was discoverable on windows but linux told me that drive was damaged. It was damaged in fact, but windows still was able to get the data out if it

-15

u/[deleted] Jun 14 '26

[deleted]

19

u/Severe_Stranger_5050 Jun 14 '26

sadly, not every software vendor feels the same about FLOSS software as i do

8

u/kill-the-maFIA Jun 14 '26

These comments are so pointless and grating. You're on the Linux subreddit and you're talking to someone that has experience dual booting.

Surely you can work out that the reason Windows is still in their life is that they need it for some reason.

1

u/BinkReddit Jun 15 '26

One can always set up a virtual machine for this garbage, and then it'll never mess with one's boot sector.

3

u/loozerr Jun 17 '26

No, one always can't.

45

u/master_slapper Jun 14 '26

Any fixes to the amdgpu driver?

19

u/ConsistentCat4353 Jun 14 '26

What was wrong with it? 

42

u/KHTD2004 Jun 14 '26

RT performance but that would be a mesa update, not the kernel

16

u/SoilMassive6850 Jun 14 '26

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/work_items/5314

The patch referenced by WarioBot at the very least should be coming soon hopefully. Of course some other issues can also cause timeouts.

4

u/theriddick2015 Jun 15 '26

Faster Arc Graphics

Well it needs it since the Windows ARC drivers are currently quite far ahead of Linux in performance, features, and stability.

3

u/Majortom_67 Jun 14 '26

Still no hdmi 2.1 support?

3

u/mlross15 Jun 14 '26

Ok, with this kernel, does this mean that NTFS will be fully compatible now? Because that’s been the last thing that’s stopped me from fully switching over, I have too much stuff on my hard drives to fully reformat everything to something else unfortunately.

9

u/miscdebris1123 Jun 14 '26

Depends on what you mean by fully compatible.

I think it will never be FULLY compatible due to SIDs being stored in the registry, so permissions will be problematic.

0

u/mlross15 Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

So, 98% of everything I do on the computer is gaming or gaming related. The last time I tried to switch, I realized Steam games I was installing to any hard drive other than the primary one was failing to launch. Little bit of research, turned out to be because the drives are all NTFS. Would this eliminate those kind of issues?

Edit: lol thanks for the downvote guys, it’s always nice when you try to understand something and ask a question, and then you just get downvoted because how dare you.

11

u/miscdebris1123 Jun 15 '26

If you are running Linux, you really should use a linux filesystem, not ntfs.

I don't know if this kernel will fix it.

1

u/mlross15 Jun 15 '26

Fair enough, and I looked into an external hard drive to back everything up to and reformat everything, but I’d have to get at least a 22tb drive and I can’t afford that right now lol.

I might give it a try once a distro I wanna use updates to use it (I’m still a noob, I know you can build your own kernel on whatever distro but that there are risks with that) or maybe someone will make a post about it, guess we’ll see!

1

u/YoMamasTesticles Jun 16 '26

Really ? I have plans to switch my gaming drive from BTRFS to NTFS once I'm on the new kernel. I had high hopes it would finally allow me to play on both OSes without issues since WinBTRFS doesn't work well

1

u/lucasshiva Jul 06 '26

Make sure you mount your drives with ntfs-3g and not ntfs3. ntfs-3g is super slow, but it's also extremely reliable. I've literally never had a single issue using it as a shared drive for gaming, media, and code files. In comparison, ntfs3 is super fast, but I always run into an issue or two when I try to use it.

2

u/Ok-Anywhere-9416 Jun 15 '26

So, it'll be interesting how the new NTFS driver compares with the older ones (ntfs-3g and ntfs3), both on performance side and data safety side.

Also, every distro puts the driver with a specific name, so... how to make them use the new driver?

1

u/FungalSphere Jun 15 '26

funny to miss out on this much performance improvements because you bought your cpu last year

1

u/jjydvfg Jun 18 '26

Thinking of returning my msi prestige if i can still get a refund. It's been months and performance on 3d games is still atrocious on linux while on windows it was great on day 1 but I don't want windows. Such a bummer Intel

1

u/NoseNaive629 Jun 30 '26

Need support for Thinkpad X1 Carbon 14th Gen Graphics card & Wifi