“Some of the more interesting changes in 2.6.31 include:
“Performance counter support for the x86 and PowerPC
architectures. Performance counters have long been an out-of-tree
feature; 2.6.31 will finally make this important hardware
capability available in the mainline kernel.“Support for char devices in user space. The immediate
application of this feature may be to provide support for the
legacy Open Sound System driver architecture.“Kmemleak, a development tool capable of finding memory leaks in
kernel code. Support for profiling the kernel with gcov has also
been added.”