Release Planning

The Xen Project follows a regular release schedule. This page describes how releases are planned and what the development cycle looks like.

Release schedule

Xen Project typically produces two major releases per year. The schedule for upcoming releases, including feature freeze and release candidate dates, is published on the Xen Project wiki and announced on xen-devel.

Development cycle

Each release cycle includes the following phases:

  • Development window: New features and significant changes are merged.

  • Feature freeze: Only bug fixes and documentation improvements are accepted.

  • Release candidate: The release is stabilized, with RC builds published for community testing.

  • Release: The final release is tagged and announced.

Long-term support

Xen Project releases are supported for at least three years after their initial release. Security fixes are backported for an extended period. See the support matrix for current support status of each release.

Getting involved in releases

You can help with release quality by:

  • Testing release candidates and reporting bugs on xen-devel.

  • Helping triage issues in the Jira tracker.

  • Contributing fixes for known issues before the feature freeze.