RIOT has a new release every three months and is named after the month it was feature frozen in. E.g. 2021.01 was feature frozen in January 2021. Feature freeze means the branch off point of the <YYYY.MM>-branch with <YYYY.MM> being the releases name. As such, any new feature merged into the master after that point, will be part of the next release. That branch, which we will call the release branch in the following is then the stable branch of RIOT.

After feature freeze, the current release candidate in the release branch is tested heavily. For more information on the release testing, have a look at our release specifications. Bug fixes that are made during this testing period are back ported from master to the release branch and a new release candidate might be created when a certain milestone is found. If all major bugs are fixed, the new RIOT release is signed off by the appointed release manager, usually within 2 weeks after the feature freeze. More details and instructions for release managers can be found in the managing a release guide.

RIOT follows a rolling release cycle, meaning, that support and bug fixes are only provided for the most current release.

Download a release

You can download the source code of our releases via Github as ZIP file or tarball. Alternatively, you can check them out if you already cloned RIOT with Git:

$ git pull --tags

$ git checkout <YYYY.MM>

Point releases and hot fixes

For major bug fixes, we may provide a point release YYYY.MM.N which results in a new ZIP file or tarball over at the release page. However, minor bug fixes are only pushed to the release branch. You can fetch that via Git using

$ git clone -b `<YYYY.MM>-branch` https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT

or

$ git pull origin <YYYY.MM-branch>:<YYYY.MM-branch>

$ git checkout <YYYY.MM-branch>

if you have RIOT already cloned.