More than 140,000 lines of code bite the dust as ancient CPUs, bus mice, and other legacy leftovers face the chop
Linux kernel 7.1 is out, bringing significant changes that have been brewing for years – including the long-promised removal of support for Intel's 486 chip and its contemporaries. More than 140,000 lines of code have been chopped, with more facing deletion.Back in May 2025, we wrote that kernel 6.15 would drop 486 support, but that change was canceled at the last minute. Now it's in: in April, Penguin Emperor Linus Torvalds merged the big change that we described back then. More work is still ahead before this is completely gone, though. The Reg reported on the Russian Baikal family of CPUs way back in 2014, and again in 2021, but now Linux support for Baikal hardware has been removed, as has support for ancient bus mouse ports.We've also previously described 7.1's new NTFS driver, NTFSplus. It's optional for now, but South Korean filesystems boffin Namjae Jeon has revived and rewritten the original read-only NTFS driver from the 1990s. Most importantly, now it's able to write to NTFS volumes as well as read from them, and it's been modernized in line with current kernel filesystem methods. Linux Weekly News (LWN) explained the change in its January Filesystem Medley.
