Hi all,

We have just tagged Zephyr 1.9.0 RC1 which mean we are feature frozen for the 1.9 release planned for the end of August.

Starting with RC1 we will only accept changes introducing bug fixes, documentation and test cases. Any features or enhancements will need to be approved by the TSC.

For the 1.9.0 release we will go back to releasing from master, meaning that all the development leading up to the 1.9.0 release will happen in master and not in a branch as we have done up to now. This will streamline development and developers will be submitting fixes to one place only reducing confusion of where to submit what fix. Once 1.9.0 is released we will create a release branch where further 1.9.0 related fixes can land after the release to driver dot releases.

Submitting new features for 1.10 can still continue on top of master, however all of the 1.10 changes will be queues until 1.9.0 is released. We however encourage everyone to focus on stabilizing any new features introduced in 1.9.0, write test cases and enhance documentation before we jump to 1.10 development right away.

Please review the release notes under doc/release-notes-1.9.rst and submit your input about features and changes you have introduced in the 1.9.0 development cycles ASAP.

We want to keep the freeze period as short as possible, so please make sure you submit any bug fixes to outstanding issues as early as possible.

Details log of changes since 1.8.0 can be found here: https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/releases/tag/v1.9.0-rc1

We will have more details and release notes with the final release in few weeks time.

Thank you everyone for working and contributing to Zephyr.

Anas