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Eclipse ThreadX: More Predictable; More Open

Last week, the Eclipse ThreadX project announced the release of ThreadX v6.4.3.202503. The version number may appear unusual at first glance; the new suffix simply designates this release as part of our Q3 2025 cycle.

While this may seem like a minor adjustment, it represents a significant milestone for the project team. With this release, Eclipse ThreadX is transitioning to a quarterly release cadence, enabling us to deliver updates and improvements on a more predictable schedule.

In keeping with our commitment to openness and transparency, we will also begin publishing and maintaining a public roadmap outlining our planned work.

Read on for the complete details.

Release Cadence

Going forward, we will publish ThreadX and its companion components at the end of each quarter. To make it easier to track when a specific release is published, we will now add this information to the end of the version string.

For example, at the time of writing, the latest ThreadX release was ThreadX 6.4.2. In the new quarterly release model, the next release of ThreadX will thus be ThreadX 6.4.3.202503.

Throughout the quarter, we will accumulate fixes and new features in the dev branch of the project’s core repositories. The dev branch will be merged into the main (master) branch at the time of the release.

This simple diagram illustrates the strategy.

Time --------------------------------------------------------------->

          |   |     |     |     |

          v   v     v     v     v

dev    ---*---*-----*-----*-----*----------------------------------->

                                       | Merge

                                       v

main   --*-----------------------------*---------------------------->

        current: v6.4.2        (quarterly release: Q3 2025)

                                        \

                                         \

                                          *

                                           tag: v6.4.3.202503_rel(on main)


If fixes for security vulnerabilities must be published urgently before the next quarterly release, we will create a hotfix branch on the latest available release and will merge the fixes into master. For example, if such urgent fixes were needed after ThreadX 6.4.3.202503 is published, we would publish v6.4.3.202503a to address them.

Naturally, hotfix releases could be published to address broken builds and other technical issues with the code. 

Public Roadmap

Over the last six months, we have been utilising a GitHub project to plan our work and track our progress. We have decided to make that project public. You will find it here. The items in the “In discussion” column of our Kanban board are issues or new feature proposals that are under evaluation by the core project team, but for which we have not yet confirmed or committed.

I encourage you to submit ideas for new features by creating issues describing your proposals. Do not forget to apply the “feature” label!

Contributors needed

Our team is still small, and we have many tasks to complete. If you are an experienced ThreadX developer or simply a seasoned embedded C developer, we need your help! Just send me an email mentioning your experience and where you would like to contribute.

Let’s grow ThreadX together. See you in December for our Q4 release!
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