Dear RIOTers,
our next month’s release is right around the corner! I will be managing this one again, and propose the following dates for the 2025.04 release cycle:
- 2025-04-06T22:00:00Z: soft feature freeze, for high impact features
- 2025-04-13T22:00:00Z: hard feature freeze, for all features
- 2025-04-27T22:00:00Z: Release date
Please let me know if you have features which are nearly there and you would really like to see in 2025.04! On my personal wishlist, there is default native64 support on 64-bit host platforms and maybe some first board aliases to arrive at more consistent board names according to RDM0003.
Enjoy the spring (or autumn depending on where you read this)! 
Mikolai
Dear RIOTers,
Yesterday was soft feature freeze day. Please now settle down and refrain from merging large impact features until the release branch is branched off.
I’ve now finally created the Github Milestone for this release, please add any outstanding PRs that you would still like to include before the hard feature freeze.
As a gentle reminder: The planned date for the hard feature freeze is next week Monday on 2025-04-13T22:00:00Z.
Thanks! 
Mikolai
Dear RIOTers,
We’ve created the 2025.04 release branch, so we are now officially in hard feature freeze. This means from now only bugfixes will be backported to the 2025.04-branch. If anyone has any bugfixes or documentation improvements that they feel should be part of this release please let me know.
New features can again be merged without release manager approval into master during this period, but they won’t end up in the 2025.04 release.
The test tracking issue of release candidate 1 is opened. Help with testing and resources for the testing is as always very welcome. Most of the testing is automated, but some stuff still needs to be run manually. So if you want to help, please put your name after the corresponding item in the linked issue to streamline the testing efforts.
Thanks all for the awesome work!
Happy freeze day! 
Mikolai
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