  In this work, the global-in-time $H^1$-stability of a fast L2-1$_\sigma$
method on general nonuniform meshes is studied for subdiffusion equations,
where the convolution kernel in the Caputo fractional derivative is
approximated by sum of exponentials. Under some mild restrictions on time
stepsize, a bilinear form associated with the fast L2-1$_\sigma$ formula is
proved to be positive semidefinite for all time. As a consequence, the uniform
global-in-time $H^1$-stability of the fast L2-1$_\sigma$ schemes can be derived
for both linear and semilinear subdiffusion equations, in the sense that the
$H^1$-norm is uniformly bounded as the time tends to infinity. To the best of
our knowledge, this appears to be the first work for the global-in-time
$H^1$-stability of fast L2-1$_\sigma$ scheme on general nonuniform meshes for
subdiffusion equations. Moreover, the sharp finite time $H^1$-error estimate
for the fast L2-1$_\sigma$ schemes is reproved based on more delicate analysis
of coefficients where the restriction on time step ratios is relaxed comparing
to existing works.
