Canonical Promises 15 Years of Support for Zephyr RTOS

Canonical announced Zephyr 26.04 LTS on Monday, a version of the open-source real-time operating system for microcontrollers that it will support for up to 15 years through its Ubuntu Pro for Devices subscription, three times the five-year maintenance window the Zephyr Project offers on its own upstream releases.

The announcement lands a day ahead of Embedded World North America, running Sept. 22-24 at the Anaheim Convention Center, where Canonical says it will demonstrate the release. Under Canonical's plan, a new LTS version arrives every two years with interim releases every six months, a cadence the company is layering on top of Zephyr's existing release process rather than replacing it.

Who backed the announcement

Jonathan Beri, Canonical's head of product for IoT, and Kate Stewart, vice president of dependable embedded systems at the Linux Foundation, which houses the Zephyr Project, both appear in the announcement. So do two hardware partners: Alex Iuorio, Avnet's senior vice president of global supplier development, and Yoshio Sato, Renesas Electronics' director of technology ecosystem.

Support commitment	Duration
Upstream Zephyr LTS (standard)	5 years
Zephyr 26.04 LTS via Ubuntu Pro for Devices	Up to 15 years
Canonical's Zephyr release cadence	New LTS every 2 years

What the longer support window covers

Canonical says the release includes native support for Golioth Cloud's over-the-air update service, extends its support coverage to West, Zephyr's build meta-tool, and works with Canonical's own containerized development environment, Canonical Workshop. The company frames the extended maintenance window partly around the European Union's Cyber Resilience Act, which sets security-maintenance obligations for connected products sold in the EU and takes fuller effect over the next two years.

That regulatory framing matters because microcontroller firmware is typically the hardest layer of a connected product to patch after it ships. A washing machine or an industrial sensor built on standard Zephyr today can expect security fixes for five years under the project's own policy; a device maker who instead builds on Canonical's Zephyr 26.04 LTS is being offered a support contract that, on paper, outlasts the products most such devices ship inside.

The context Canonical left out

Canonical's post does not list a price for the Zephyr tier of Ubuntu Pro for Devices, and does not say how many device makers have signed on ahead of Monday's announcement. For scale on the project it is extending support for: Embedded Computing Design reported that at embedded world's Germany edition earlier in 2026, Zephyr RTOS already supported more than 900 boards across Arm, RISC-V, Tensilica, Renesas RX, ARC and x86 architectures, and that the project had added five new silver members plus two associate members, BeagleBoard.org and openEuler. That coverage, from a separate Embedded World event on a different continent, makes no mention of Canonical or of a downstream long-term-support offering. Canonical's move follows a broader pattern of commercial support layers building on top of community-run open-source projects, similar to how Jujutsu's open-source ecosystem has grown a ring of separately built tools around a project one engineer started, and how Sarah Jamie Lewis's Base Browser repackages an existing open-source browser under different maintenance terms.

The next thing to watch is uptake: whether device makers building for the EU market choose Canonical's paid support tier over maintaining their own backports of upstream Zephyr security fixes, a choice that will show up in Zephyr Project membership rosters and Canonical's own customer disclosures rather than in this week's announcement.