Fedora QA Launches Test Days for Linux Kernel 7.1 on Fedora 43 and 44
Community verification kicks off ahead of the official kernel release window closing.
The Fedora QA team has started test days for the Linux Kernel 7.1 series across both Fedora Linux 44 and Fedora Linux 43. If your hardware has been acting up after recent updates, these test days exist specifically to catch those regressions before they land in stable repositories. You'll want to boot the test images, run your normal workflows, and file bugs on whatever breaks.
These test days focus squarely on the 7.1 kernel. The goal is straightforward: verify that Fedora 44 and Fedora 43 handle the new kernel cleanly across a wide range of desktops, servers, and spin flavors. You'll need a virtual machine or a spare physical machine, fully updated Fedora 44 or 43, and at least a few gigabytes of free storage. If you're flashing a fresh system, grab the official F44 test day image. If you're testing on an existing install, you'll pull the 7.1 kernel directly from Koji. Head over to QA:Testcase kernel regression for the official checklist. The pre-installed regression suite for live image users sits in /home/liveuser/kernel-tests/, and you can log your findings on the central result page.
Who's watching the build
A solid squad of Fedora QA and development folks will be online to debug issues and answer questions. Justin Forbes and Augusto Caringi are handling the development side, while Lukáš Růžička, Kamil Paral, Adam Williamson, Petr Sklenář, and Jaroslav Groman are watching from quality assurance. You can ping the whole group on Matrix. Check the infobox at the top of the test day page for the direct chat link.
How to get the kernel
Pulling the kernel from Koji takes a couple of extra steps depending on your system type. On traditional RPM-based Fedora, install the koji CLI tool and list available 7.1 builds with
koji list-builds --package=kernel --after="2026-06-26" --pattern "kernel-7.1*"
Download the RPMs you want to test, then run
sudo dnf update kernel-*.rpm
and reboot. Silverblue, Kinoite, and other atomic flavors will need rpm-ostree override replace kernel-modules-core-7*.rpm kernel-core-7*.rpm kernel-modules-7*.rpm kernel-7*.rpm kernel-modules-extra-7*.rpm before restarting. Secure Boot users should lean toward the Koji F43 build or the kernel-stabilization COPR, since those tend to play nicer with locked-down systems. Keep in mind that you should absolutely not run these test builds on a machine with important data. Things might go wrong, and rolling back a kernel override on a production box is a headache you don't need.
Running the tests
Follow the official regression instructions and log your results in the 'Regression' column on the test day result page. Most column headers are clickable and link directly to the test case details. While the automated regressions matter, Fedora QA also wants to know how the kernel feels in the wild. If you notice odd power management behavior, weird suspend/resume crashes, or just general performance shifts, drop those observations into QA:Testcase Exploratory Testing. Real-world usage reports catch things that synthetic benchmarks miss.
Every bug caught during a Test Day is one less broken upgrade sitting in someone's inbox on release day. The long wait for kernel 7.1 to land is over for Fedora users; now it's just a matter of making sure it lands cleanly.
