OVN has grown in popularity over the years, and as a result, we are receiving many more feature request patches than we had in previous release cycles. The past two or three release cycles, we have had to either delay soft freeze or extend soft freeze in order to allow for requested submissions to be considered.
This documentation change proposes extending the soft freeze period from two weeks to four weeks, to give more time for reviews prior to testing. >From the release calendar update in 2026, you can see that the way this is accomplished is by moving the branch and subsequent release two weeks later than they had previously been. The other option was to move soft freeze two weeks earlier, but this has the potential to cause problems for patches that rely on new OVS features. OVS soft freeze currently ends right as OVN's is beginning. Thus if an OVN feature relies on an OVS patch to go in first, then it works out well with the current schedule. If OVN and OVS have overlapping soft freeze periods, then trying to get the OVN patches reviewed could be a challenge. Signed-off-by: Mark Michelson <mmich...@redhat.com> --- There are no changes to this patch from the RFC version. --- Documentation/internals/release-process.rst | 12 ++++++------ 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) diff --git a/Documentation/internals/release-process.rst b/Documentation/internals/release-process.rst index ab5f5fb93..747fca34b 100644 --- a/Documentation/internals/release-process.rst +++ b/Documentation/internals/release-process.rst @@ -151,13 +151,13 @@ approximate: +---------------+---------------------+--------------------------------------+ | Time (months) | Example Dates | Stage | +---------------+---------------------+--------------------------------------+ -| T | Mar 1, Sep 1, ... | Begin x.y release cycle | +| T | Mar 15, Sep 16, ... | Begin x.y release cycle | +---------------+---------------------+--------------------------------------+ -| T + 4.5 | Jul 15, Jan 15, ... | "Soft freeze" main for x.y release | +| T + 4 | Jul 15, Jan 15, ... | "Soft freeze" main for x.y release | +---------------+---------------------+--------------------------------------+ -| T + 5 | Aug 1, Feb 1, ... | Fork branch-x.y from main | +| T + 5 | Aug 15, Feb 15, ... | Fork branch-x.y from main | +---------------+---------------------+--------------------------------------+ -| T + 6 | Sep 1, Mar 1, ... | Release version x.y.0 | +| T + 6 | Sep 15, Mar 15, ... | Release version x.y.0 | +---------------+---------------------+--------------------------------------+ Subsequent Releases @@ -194,9 +194,9 @@ Below is the 2026 timetable +---------+-------------+-----------------+---------+ | Release | Soft Freeze | Branch Creation | Release | +---------+-------------+-----------------+---------+ -| 26.03.0 | Jan 23 | Feb 6 | Mar 6 | +| 26.03.0 | Jan 23 | Feb 20 | Mar 20 | +---------+-------------+-----------------+---------+ -| 26.09.0 | Jul 24 | Aug 7 | Sep 4 | +| 26.09.0 | Jul 24 | Aug 21 | Sep 18 | +---------+-------------+-----------------+---------+ Contact -- 2.50.1 _______________________________________________ dev mailing list d...@openvswitch.org https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-dev
