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Lyrical Luth (codename ‘lyrical’; May, 2026)

Lyrical Luth is the twelfth release of ROS 2.

Release Timeline 

As soon as possible - Migrate ROS Rolling to ROS Lyrical’s target platforms

RHEL 10 + Ubuntu 26.04: Migrate as soon as core packages successfully build on both platforms.
Windows 11: Migrate as soon as we have a green build

Mon. April 13, 2026 - Alpha + RMW freeze (Delayed; was originally April 6th)

Preliminary testing of ROS Base packages
API and feature freeze for RMW provider packages.

Mon. April 20, 2026 - Freeze (Delayed; was originally April 13th)

API and feature freeze for ROS Base packages in Rolling Ridley.
Only bug fix releases should be made after this point.
New packages can be released.

Mon. April 21, 2026 - Branch (Delayed; was originally April 20th)

Branch from Rolling Ridley
rosdistro is reopened for Rolling PRs for ROS Base packages.
Lyrical development shifts from ros-rolling-* packages to ros-lyrical-* packages.

Mon. April 27, 2026 - Beta

Updated releases of ROS Desktop packages available.
Call for general testing.

Thu, April 30, 2026 - Kick off Tutorial Party

Open up tutorials for community testing.

Mon. May 11, 2026 - Release Candidate

Build release candidate packages up to ROS Desktop

Mon. May 18, 2026 - Distro Freeze

Freeze all Lyrical branches on all ROS desktop packages
No pull requests for any Lyrical branch or targeting lyrical/distribution.yaml in rosdistro repo will be merged.

Friday May 22nd, 2026 - General Availability

Release announcement.
ROS desktop packages source freeze is lifted and rosdistro is reopened for Lyrical pull requests.

For progress on the development of Lyrical Luth, see this project board. For the broad process followed by Lyrical Luth, see the process description page.

Supported Platforms 

ROS Lyrical supports the following platforms according to the platform support tiers:

Architecture	Ubuntu Resolute (26.04)	Ubuntu Noble* (24.04)	Windows 11 (VS2022)	RHEL 10*	macOS	Debian Trixie* (13)	OpenEmbedded / Yocto Project
amd64	Tier 1 [d][a]	Tier 3	Tier 1 [a]	Tier 2 [d][a]	Tier 3	Tier 3	Tier 3
arm64	Tier 1 [d][a]	Tier 3				Tier 3	Tier 3
arm32	Tier 3	Tier 3				Tier 3	Tier 3

* Early EOL per the platform EOL policy
- Ubuntu Noble is supported until 2029-06-01
- RHEL 10 is supported until 2030-05-31
- Debian Trixie is supported until 2028-08-09
[d] You may install ROS Lyrical on this platform using Distribution-specific packaegs (Debian, RPM, etc.).
[a] You may install ROS Lyrical by downloading an archive containing pre-built packages for all packages in the ROS Lyrical ros2.repos file

To use ROS Lyrical on any Tier 3 platform, you must build ROS Lyrical from source.

Minimum Language Requirements 

[C++20](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/ros-2-lyrical-c-version/52551)
C17
Python 3.12 - 3.14

Dependency Requirements 

TODO - this section will show a table of important system package versions across supported platforms.

Middleware Implementation support 

The default middleware in ROS Lyrical is rmw_fastrtps_cpp.

Middleware Library	Middleware Provider	Support Level	Platforms	Architectures
rmw_fastrtps_cpp	eProsima Fast-DDS	Tier 1	All Platforms	All Architectures
rmw_connextdds	RTI Connext	Tier 1	Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS	All Architectures except arm64
rmw_cyclonedds_cpp	Eclipse Cyclone DDS	Tier 1	All Platforms	All Architectures
rmw_zenoh_cpp	Eclipse Zenoh	Tier 1	All Platforms	All Architectures
rmw_fastrtps_dynamic_cpp	eProsima Fast-DDS	Tier 2	All Platforms	All Architectures
rmw_gurumdds_cpp	GurumNetworks GurumDDS	Tier 3	Ubuntu and Windows	All Architectures except arm32

Middleware implementation support is dependent upon the platform support tier. For example, a Tier 1 middleware implementation on a Tier 2 platform will only receive Tier 2 support.

New features in this ROS 2 release 

`class_loader`

Add support for passing arguments to constructors. As a result, users can now create plugins that are not default constructible, removing the need for initialize method.

See https://github.com/ros/class_loader/pull/223 for more details.

`plugin_lib`

Add support for passing arguments to constructors.

See https://github.com/ros/pluginlib/pull/291 for more details.

`image_transport`

image_transport now supports lifecycle nodes.

See https://github.com/ros-perception/image_common/pull/352 for more details.

`point_cloud_transport`

point_cloud_transport now supports lifecycle nodes.

See https://github.com/ros-perception/point_cloud_transport/pull/109 for more details.

A new rcl_logging_implementation package has been introduced to allow users to select the logging backend implementation at runtime without rebuilding rcl. Users can set the RCL_LOGGING_IMPLEMENTATION environment variable to switch between available logging backends (e.g., rcl_logging_spdlog, rcl_logging_noop, or custom implementations). If not specified, rcl_logging_spdlog is used by default.

See https://github.com/ros2/rcl/issues/1178, https://github.com/ros2/rcl/pull/1276, and https://github.com/ros2/rcl_logging/pull/135 for more details.

`rosidl_python`

Passing in Python set objects into array or sequence fields is now deprecated. Instead pass in something that implements collections.abc.Sequence most commonly a list, tuple, or a numpy.ndarray. To be removed in ROS M.