Char/Misc With Linux 5.10 Brings Nitro Enclaves, Alder Lake, More Code For Gaudi

The "char/misc" area within the Linux kernel continues to have a bit of everything as the "catch all" pull request of the kernel not fitting into other existing subsystems.

Linux 5.10 continues to have an interesting assortment of work. On Thursday the char/misc material was sent in by Greg Kroah-Hartman and subsequently merged, some of the highlights include:

- Support for Amazon Nitro Enclaves with EC2 for supporting security-critical applications. This is about the kernel infrastructure in the Amazon AWS environment for being able to punt sensitive work/data off to an isolated virtual machine lacking persistent storage and other safeguards to reduce the potential attack surface.

- The Intel Trace Hub (intel_th) driver has added support for Intel Alder Lake processors.

- Qualcomm's MHI bus added in Linux 5.7 supports more features with Linux 5.10 albeit mostly lower-level changes.

- The Intel-owned Habana Labs continues working extensively on their upstream kernel driver supporting their AI inference and training accelerators. With Linux 5.10 is a wide range of improvements to the Habana Labs kernel code largely on the Gaudi side.

- The SoundWire code has gained support for run-time power management, including within the Intel SoundWire support paths. The Intel code also adds multi-link support and other improvements.

The lengthy list of char/misc changes in full for Linux 5.10 can be found via this pull.