Kernel Watch
Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to.
L
inus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.11, just in time for Valentine’s Day 2021. In his announcement, Linus noted that just because it was Valentine’s Day didn’t mean it wasn’t a good time to do some kernel testing, “Because I’m sure your SO [Significant Other] will understand”. The new kernel includes many features. Among them is support for faster system call emulation in Wine, the ability to have unprivileged OverlayFS mounts, and support for Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX). We’ve previously covered the saga that was the implausibly long journey toward the merging of SGX after many dozens of tries.