3-year LTS support
Starting with version 2025.02, the LTS support has been extended to
3 years, replacing the previous 1-year cycle.
Vulnerability tracking & reporting
Tracking of the vulnerabilities affecting Buildroot
is available at
security.buildroot.org.
LTS stewards ensure this data remains up-to-date by actively
maintaining Buildroot packages metadata.
Sponsored LTS stewards
To ensure a consistent release cadence and maintenance workflow, paid LTS stewards are assigned to the weekly LTS maintenance tasks.
Dedicated backports
Vulnerability fixes applied to the master branch will be
prioritized for backporting to stable branches.
The Buildroot LTS sponsorship initiative has evolved from a more
comprehensive understanding of the needs of our user base.
To address these requirements, the release model evolves into the following.
Starting with 2025.02, the first release of every odd-numbered year is a long-term
support (LTS) release supported for three years.
In between, non-LTS releases are made every 3 months.
Each week, the LTS stewards define the set of commits to analyze based on the previous week's commits to the master branch. The commits are then annotated to define a list of candidates for the LTS branches.
Mid-week, the candidates are cherry-picked to a staging branch hosted on
gitlab.com/essensium-mind/buildroot.
Every maintained branch has a staging branch, with the .x
suffix replaced by .pre. The staging branch allows other
maintainers to review the changes before they are pushed upstream.
By the end of the week, the staging branches are pushed upstream and contributors are notified. Feedback from users, sponsors and autobuilders are then collected and vulnerability analyses updated.
For more information about the development workflow, see the documentation.
Long-term sustainability
Sponsors ensure the long-term sustainability of the Buildroot LTS effort with dedicated stewards assigned to tasks such as backporting, security monitoring and LTS releases.
Recognition of your sponsorship
Sponsors can be publicly acknowledged on the Buildroot website. Sponsors may provide a logo linking to a webpage of their choice.
Direct interaction with LTS stewards
Sponsors may submit queries and requests regarding Buildroot LTS and security updates.
Assignment of priorities for package tracking
Buildroot integrates more than 2000 open source packages,
many of which do not offer long-term stable releases or
security updates.
Sponsors may submit a priority list indicating:
- Packages of interest
- Architectures of interest
Testing of your packages
To make sure the packages of interest to the sponsors don't include regressions between releases. Sponsors may submit a list of packages to be tested before a bugfix release.
Personalized security reports
Sponsors receive personalized security reports for their Buildroot packages in the form of security.buildroot.org with comparison with the upstream branches.
Interested ? Contact us at buildroot-lts@buildroot.org to learn more about the different sponsorship tiers and get all the details about the sponsorship.