Reliable Embedded Systems

The 2.6.31 release is most notable for its support for USB 3.0, otherwise known as "SuperSpeed USB," which boasts performance up to 5Gbps.

The 2.6.31 release is also claimed to run faster, including slightly faster file system reads. Additional enhancements to Linux 2.6.31 are said to include:

• Equivalent of FUSE for character devices used for proxying OSS sound to ALSA
• Memory management changes that improve interactivity in desktops
• Readahead improvements
• ATI Radeon mode-setting support
• Intel Wireless Multicomm 3200 WiFi support
• Performance counter kernel support and userspace tool
• Gcov support
• Memory checker for uninitialized memory
• Memory leak detector
• Reimplementation of inotify and dnotify on top of a new filesystem notification infrastructure
• Btrfs file-system improvements
• IEEE 802.15.4 networking support
• IPv4 over Firewire support
• "Many new drivers, small improvements and fixes"