Kernel Watch
Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to.
L
inus Torvalds announced the first few release candidates of what will become Linux 5.11 in the months ahead. He kicked off shortly after the holidays by saying “Christmas is over, and so is the merge window.” He noted that the latest kernel had “more than 1,500 actual developers, and roughly 12,500 changes merged”, which is “pretty much our average these days”. Any way you slice it, this remains a large number.
Plenty of new features made it into Linux 5.11, including some that had been in the works for a long time. Topping the list of unlikely candidates was support for Intel’s Software Guard eXtensions (SGX), which was finally merged into the kernel after 41 iterations of the patch series. SGX is a hardware feature that aims to enable applications (or the kernel) to create secure “enclaves” containing encrypted code and data that can’t be introspected by the rest of the system, even the OS or the administrator.