For Americans, yesterday was an important day, at least in terms of sports. It is when the Super Bowl was held, a great event that is not only in sports, since there is talk of advertisements and the concerts that take place during the break. Outside of the United States, all that matters less, and Linus Torvalds led a normal life, launching the Linux 5.11-rc7 that had to arrive yesterday, Sunday, February 7. Like in the sixth and the previous five, calm has reigned.
Torvalds has used much of the release note To comment on how he sees the Super Bowl, and rather than comment, I would say that he criticizes it, even if it is minimally. It talks about a somewhat more modern version of another game that I personally do not know (egg-and-spoon race), and that, after twenty years in the country, has not yet caught the rules. For all the rest, there is nothing worrisome.
Everything indicates that on February 14 it will launch Linux 5.11
Nothing hugely scary is highlighted, and most of the patch is some new self-tests. In fact, about a quarter of the patch is documentation and self-testing. The rest is just the usual random noise: architecture updates, drivers (gpu and usb stand out a bit), some file system fixes, and some top VM and network fixes.
Linux 5.11-rc7 does not include a patch for a performance-affecting regression at AMD, but that patch should be available next week. If there are no surprises, and it seems that there will not be, Linux 5.11 will arrive in the form of a stable version on February 14. As always, remember that it will be the version of the kernel that Ubuntu 21.04 will use Hirsute Hippo when it is released on April 22. Other distributions, such as most that use the Rolling Release development model, will add it as an option when they release the first Linux 5.11 point update.