The New Features of Linux 2.6.31

“Among the new features are USB 3.0 support and support of
several Sound Blaster X-Fi cards by Creative. The kernel makes
better use of the power saving techniques offered by modern Wi-Fi
hardware and is now also capable of Kernel-Based Mode-Setting (KMS)
with Radeon graphics cards up to model X1950. From now on,
distributions are to use the more recent of the two FireWire
stacks, which with the new kernel version will at last offer ‘IP
over 1394’ networking support.

“The new kernel’s experimental Btrfs, scheduled to become the
‘next generation file system for Linux’, is now said to be faster
and more memory efficient and the first components for
de-fragmenting Ext4 file systems have been included into the main
development branch. The new performance counters allow a detailed
analysis of the run-time behaviour of program code. The developers
also considerably modified and improved the recently introduced
tracing infrastructure.”

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