After the hard feature freeze, the master branch in git is no longer open for general development. Only bug fixes will be accepted until the next stable tag.

(This definition is modeled after QEMU's hard feature freeze).

Announcing the hard feature freeze

The proposed schedule for the active development cycle is shown in the EDK II Release Planning article. Shortly before the hard feature freeze, an announcement email is sent to the edk2-devel mailing list. The announcement is posted by one of the maintainers that are listed in Maintainers.txt, in section EDK II Releases.