Support for the Wii controller remote is equally interesting. With this you'll be able to use the WiiMote and other Wii controller devices with Linux machines for whatever creative purposes you can imagine (or program). There are a couple of ports of Linux available today that run on the Nintendo Wii console: and GameCube Linux. But perhaps with Wii remote support baked in, gesture-based gaming will soon be an option for Linux devices -- like desktops. Many Wii controllers such as the balance board, Nunchuk, etc., support Bluetooth and can also interact with a computer that way.

There are also "performance improvements to the writeback throttling, some speedups in the slab allocator, bad block management in the generic software RAID layer, a new 'cpupowerutils' userspace utility for power management, filesystem barriers enabled by default in Ext3, and new drivers," according to Kernelnewbies.org.

In his note announcing Linux 3.1, Torvalds joked (a little) about the breach at kernel.org and noted that 3.1 is signed by his own GNU Privacy Guard key, an implementation of PGP. To recap: In late August that is the home of the Linux project. They gained root access to a known as Hera and ultimately compromised a number of other servers in the kernel.org infrastructure. This led the Kernel.org folks to take down and rebuild the entire site and is one of the reasons the 3.1 release took nearly a month longer to release than the typical Linux release cycle.

Here is the full text announcement on 3.1 from Torvalds posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List:

"As promised, the kernel summit has started, and Linux-3.1 is out. The (small) shortlog of changes since -rc10 are appended, we have mostly some sparc and networking changes, along with some radeon and intel iommu fixes (mostly for largepages and integrated graphics issues).