Background

Base Command Manager (BCM) is moving to using Semantic Versioning for BCM 10, 11, and future BCM releases.

Semantic Versioning Defined

Semantic Versioning is a versioning scheme where:

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes

MINOR version when you add functionality in a backward-compatible manner

PATCH version when you make backward-compatible bug fixes

In BCM the scheme can be thought of as:

• MAJOR: BCM Version Release (10,11, or 12 (*future))
• MINOR: Feature Releases
• PATCH: Bug Fixes

Rationale

• Previously, we were required to include calendar dates in our version numbers; this change aligns with NVIDIA’s best practices.
• This change will allow us to use consistent naming and not require a version rename for a release built over multiple months.
  • Version renames can be confusing and introduce a lot of communication overhead.

Future Releases

From now on, we will use the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH scheme for all new feature releases.

For the next BCM10 and BCM11 releases, we are skipping a few minor version numbers. This is to clarify that the second number in the naming scheme is no longer the release’s calendar year, but instead the MINOR version.

For each regular feature release of BCM, we ship, we will default to always incrementing the MINOR version number and resetting PATCH to zero.

A small, but for completeness noteworthy, drawback with this approach is that we might sometimes ship a scheduled bug-fix-only release, while also incrementing the MINOR number. 

In summary, we will increment the third (PATCH) number only rarely, e.g., for emergency (unscheduled) hotfix bugfix releases. So, in most cases, for most update releases, the PATCH number will be a “0.”

Impact on BCM

Moving forward, we will use the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH scheme for all new update releases that are not GA yet.

We are thus discontinuing the MAJOR.YEAR.MONTH scheme that was adopted two years ago for BCM 10 and BCM 11. In the previous scheme, 10.25.03 is a release for:

• BCM 10
  in
  • 2025 (25)
  • March (3)

The upcoming BCM 11 update release will be 11.30.0 (as of the creation of this article, September 2, 2025):

• MAJOR: (BCM) 11
  • MINOR: 30
  • PATCH: 0

There will be no changes for versions BCM 9.x and older.

Update Releases

BCM 10

The next BCM 10 update release will be 10.30.0.

Subsequent update releases will be

• 10.31.0
• 10.32.0

BCM 11

The next BCM 11 update release will be 11.30.0. 

Subsequent update releases will be

• 11.31.0
• 11.32.0

BCM 12 (*Future)

The first BCM 12 release will be 12.0.0.

Release Candidates

As part of making a release, we start with 11.30.0-rc1 and increment (11.30.0-rc2, 11.30.0-rc3) until we ship 11.30.0.

Patch/Bugfix Releases

As mentioned above, we rarely increment the third (PATCH) number, except for emergency (unscheduled) hotfix bugfix releases.

95% of our releases contain both features and bugfixes; our default is that each release increments the MINOR version number and resets PATCH to zero.

If by chance we do have to release a patch of bugfix, the standard scheme will apply, with the PATCH version being incremented by one: 11.30.1