And the good is over. Well, days ago and if we can accept as "good" a Christmas vacation in which we have not been as close to our relatives as we would have liked. It's already half a week since Christmas is over, but I comment on this because Linus Torvalds launched Linux 5.11-rc3, the first post-Christmas Release Candidate of the kernel version currently in development which is here with an expected news.
Rc2 I arrive on Sunday January 3, which was still Christmas and in Spain we were waiting for the arrival of the Three Kings. The size was miniscule, according to the father of Linux, but that was normal considering that everyone had relaxed a bit. The highlights of Linux 5.11-rc3 is that the size has increased, but I can't think of anything more logical considering that the previous RC was small and in third they have included much of the work that they did not introduce seven days ago.
Linux 5.11-rc3 doesn't break records, but it's big
The final rc3 ends up getting bigger as the rc3s progress. There is no great "record break," but it is certainly bigger than average. So instead of a slow start due to the holidays, I think we saw some pent-up fixes. The changes are over, with nothing in particular standing out. About half of the rc3 patch is drivers, and the self-test updates (mainly kvm and netfilter) are another healthy 15%.
The rest is the usual random mix: architecture updates (mainly x86 and arm64 and much related to kvm), documentation, filesystem code (btrfs, io_uring), networking, etc. But there is nothing that looks particularly strange there, and I think the size is literally due to rc2 being so small. So I think overall everything seems normal for this release, and my theory that maybe we need an additional release candidate just for Christmas impact was just wrong.
Linux 5.11 will arrive in february, and most likely the kernel version that uses Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo and all its official flavors.