Release life cycle

Release life cycle

The Gluon maintainers are releasing new versions on an irregular schedule, depending on the state of the master branch concerning the stability of new features and OpenWrt updates.

Minor releases appear in each of the supported branches on a regular basis, carrying backported fixes and updates to the OpenWrt base (kernel updates and bugfixes).

The support for a release usually ends some time after the next major release. Exceptions to the rule do exist.

Gluon Branch	OpenWrt Release	Release Date	End of Support	Comment
v2014.3.x	12.09	2014-08-02	2014-10-19	VPN over IPv6 and other IPv6 improvements
v2014.4.x	14.07	2014-12-30	2015-01-26	added batman-adv compat15
v2015.1.x	14.07	2015-05-16	2016-01-02	added mesh-on-lan, other targets than ar71xx-generic
v2016.1.x	15.05	2016-02-08	2016-09-18	added status page, 802.11s
v2016.2.x	15.05	2016-09-21	2018-04-10
v2017.1.x	lede-17.01	2017-06-10	2018-07-17 (v2017.1.8)
v2018.1.x	lede-17.01	2018-07-08	2018-12-20 (v2018.1.4)	added multidomain, vxlan, BATMAN_V
v2018.2.x	18.06	2018-12-29	2020-01-03 (v2018.2.4)
v2019.1.x	18.06	2019-09-14	2020-12	Last release with IBSS & batman-adv compat14 support
v2020.1.x	19.07	2020-02-10	2020-09-01 (v2020.1.4)
v2020.2.x	19.07	2020-07-19	2022-03-31	Last release to support updates from before v2018.2, added device classes (tiny/standard), WPA3, SAE
v2021.1.x	19.07	2021-06-10	2022-10-31	Last release to support devices with only 4MB flash (openwrt-19.07)
v2022.1.x	22.03	2022-09-05	2023-08-10
v2023.1.x	22.03	2023-08-10	2024-03-31	Last release to support updates from before v2022.1.x
v2023.2.x	23.05	2024-01-05	tbd	Last release to support Tunneldigger and Babel

Migration paths diagram

Legend:

• oldest - the smallest version which can update to the next release
• shortest - the highest version which is supported from this release

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> v2016.2.x
    v2016.2.x --> v2019.1.x: shortest
    v2016.2.x --> v2018.2.x
    v2018.2.x --> v2021.1.x: oldest
    v2018.2.x --> v2019.1.x
    v2019.1.x --> v2020.1.x
    v2019.1.x --> v2021.1.x: shortest
    note left of v2019.1.x: last IBSS & batman-adv compat14 release
    note left of v2021.1.x: last 4/32 release
    v2020.1.x --> v2022.1.x: oldest
    note right of v2020.1.x: Upgrading ERX from before v2020.1.x might brick (#1937)
    v2021.1.x --> v2023.1.x: shortest
    
    v2021.1.x --> v2022.1.x
    v2022.1.x --> v2023.1.x
    note right of v2023.1.x: v2023.1.1 bricks FB7520/7530.\nv2023.1.2 fixes FB7520/7530.
    v2022.1.x --> v2023.2.x: oldest
    v2023.1.x --> v2023.2.x
    note right of v2023.2.x: Upgrading from before v2022.1.x bricks x86-64\nLast release to support Tunneldigger and Babel
    v2023.2.x --> [*]

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Migration issues and affected devices

When migrating, one should be aware of the following issues and avoid/skip the exact versions for affected devices:

• before v2020.1 UBNT Edgerouter X/X-SFP might soft-brick - see also the gluon issue
• releases before v2021.1.2 are affected of CVE-2022-24884 and can be upgraded with signatures of all zero
• v2021.1.1/v2021.1.2 Joy-IT OR 750i can not upgrade
• v2023.1.1 soft-bricks FB7520/FB7530
• v2022.1 up to v2023.1.2/v2023.2.1 WDR4300 and WDR3600 hang occasionally at boot

If you try to build old versions you might encounter git://github.com/ URLs. Those won't work as GitHub discontinued support for the git protocol in 2022. You can use the following command to replace them automatically:

git config --global 'url.https://github.com/.insteadOf' 'git://github.com/'