Here's my proposal for 8.0 cycle freeze and release dates: https://wiki.qemu.org/Planning/8.0
2022-12-14 : Beginning of development phase 2022-03-07 : Soft feature freeze. Only bug fixes after this point. All feature changes must be already in a sub maintainer tree and all pull requests from submaintainers must have been sent to the list by this date. 2022-03-14: Hard feature freeze. Tag rc0 2022-03-21: Tag rc1 2022-03-28: Tag rc2 2022-04-04: Tag rc3 2022-04-11: Release; or tag rc4 if needed 2022-04-18: Release if we needed an rc4 thanks -- PMM