Linux Kernel 7.1.3 drops with security patches and stability fixes three weeks after v7.1
Greg Kroah-Hartman signed off the stable release on Saturday, July 4, 2026, and it is already sitting on kernel.org. If you run production NFS servers, KVM hosts with AMD SEV, or any SMB share managed by ksmbd, you will want to apply this update today.
Linux 7.1.3 is a longterm-stable point release in the v7.1.x branch. It lands just twenty-one days after the v7.1 feature drop, which shipped on June 14, 2026. That base release brought a modernized NTFS driver, BPF-controlled io_uring, default Intel FRED support, and a swap table rework that shaved roughly 30 percent off swap metadata overhead. It was a heavy development cycle.
Now comes the cleanup. 7.1.3 does not add new features beyond one already-present improvement to ublk shared memory zero-copy. Instead, it patches the race conditions, memory leaks, and bounds checking failures that surface when thousands of engineers actually deploy the code.
Security and memory safety fixes
The ksmbd patch is the headline. A crafted SMB2 ACL with a malformed ACE triggers an out-of-bounds heap read of up to several kilobytes past the pntsd allocation. Authenticated clients can force the kernel to compare against internal SIDs, which opens the door to reading kernel heap memory. Security researchers have already noted the attack surface.
KVM hosts running AMD SEV with debug encryption face a page overflow in sev_dbg_crypt(). When the destination offset exceeds the source offset, the PSP command writes up to 4112 bytes into a 4096-byte buffer. KASAN caught the slab use-after-free before it could spiral into guest memory corruption. Hyper-V nested virtualization gets a similar bounds check fix for unbounded VP IDs during TLB flushes.
The NFS and NFSD subsystems absorbed the bulk of the remaining patches. Jeff Layton and Chris Mason worked through roughly a dozen commits fixing ACL leaks, inverted TTL checks that prematurely reaped copy state, and a write verifier that stopped rotating on deferred writeback errors. Clients receiving unchanged verifiers would happily assume durability. They would be wrong. Michael Bommarito addressed a panic-triggering flaw in the pNFS flexfiles decoder where zero-length addresses dereference NULL. Several other patches clean up leaked slab objects and misleading -EEXIST returns after successful NFSv4 retries.
Architecture, framebuffer, and networking
Framebuffer developers patched a string of use-after-free and out-of-bounds read bugs in fbcon, fbdev, and the OMAP2 driver. The fbcon font set failure path left the console in a desynchronized state where character indices over 255 could be accepted from userspace and written to the reverted 256-character font array. That is a kernel memory disclosure waiting to happen.
The MIPS PREEMPT_RT reboot hang finally gets resolved. After smp_send_stop(), secondary CPUs were marked offline for the scheduler but never informed RCU. Any irq_work_sync() call during reboot triggered a permanent stall. OpenWrt users running Realtek MIPS SoCs had been hitting this wall for weeks. RISC-V got a kfence false-positive fix and a stale TLB entry correction. TCP-AO clients can stop worrying about async key deletion leaving dangling pointers to freed slab memory. The 9p client fix rounds out the networking stack cleanup.
Keep in mind that this is still a maintenance release, not a feature drop. The volume of NFS fixes suggests the swap table rework and VFS changes exposed latent race conditions in the server code path. The MIPS reboot fix alone prevents a generation of router upgrades from bricking in place. It is a rather heavy patch set for what is technically just point release number three, though the stability guarantees it provides keep it firmly in the must-update column.
You can grab the tarball from the link. Run the standard make olddefconfig && make -j$(nproc) && sudo make modules_install sequence, or wait for your distro to push the update within the week. Head here to check the full changelog if you want to dig into every commit.
Linux kernel 7.1.3 released
Linux kernel version 7.1.3 is now available:
Full source: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.1.3.tar.xz
Patch: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/patch-7.1.3.xz
PGP Signature: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v7.x/linux-7.1.3.tar.sign
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/ds/v7.1.3/v7.1.2
