Linux kernel 3.1 provides better power management via the new cpupowerutils userspace utility, the EXT3 filesystem gets the filesystem barriers enabled by default, and lots of drivers were added and updated.
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While there's no official announcement from Linus Torvalds, we can tell you that the new Linux kernel 3.1 brings improvements for the Intel Ivy Bridge chips, support for Cedar Trail, GMA500 enhancements, and much more.
Highlights of Linux Kernel 3.1:
· New architecture: OpenRISC;
· Dynamic writeback throttling;
· Filesystem barriers enabled by default in EXT3;
· Support for Near-Field Communication;
· Slab allocator speedups;
· VFS Scalability improvements;
· New iSCSI implementation;
· New cpupowerutils utility;
· Software RAID: Bad block management;
· Personality to report 2.6.x version numbers;
· Wii Controller support;
· Lots of new drivers;
· Many bugfixes and improvements.
Linux kernel 3.1 also brings lots of improvements for various supported filesystems, such as Btrfs, NFS, XFS, FAT, HFS+ or SquashFS. A Xen pci backend driver is also present, as well as support for Nested VMX (AMD virtualization).
These are just a few of the new features available in Linux kernel 3.1. For a complete list of all the newly supported devices, newly added drivers, and other improvements, do not hesitate to take a look at the changelog and the Linux kernel 3.1 DriverArch page.
Until kernel.org will be updated with the stable packages for Linux kernel 3.1, you can download the Git sources from here.
