firmware

[!IMPORTANT] XEdDSA signing policy has changed. In Compatible mode, nodes no longer sign packets; AES-CCM now takes precedence, and Strict mode gains exemptions. Review your signing settings after updating. (#12191) Key verification is now refused when licensed (ham) mode is enabled. (#12201)

[!NOTE] MQTT gateways now uplink PKI direct messages they relay but cannot decrypt. These messages stay end-to-end encrypted. (#12110)

🌟 Highlights

📡 Radio performance and reliability

• Smarter Listen Before Talk: CAD-to-RX handoff, correct symbol timing, and better thresholds (#11137)
• Received LoRa frames are now read from a dedicated FreeRTOS task (#11983)
• Fixes for many RX/TX edge cases:
  • Preamble hold sized for the worst-case frame (#12125)
  • Damaged-header CAD handoffs now end cleanly (#12144)
  • A stale RX flag can no longer clobber a live frame (#12153)
  • SX126x re-stages a TX after the modem parameters change (#12101)
• AGC is reset only when the radio has gone quiet (or once a day), and the RadioLib BUSY wait is bounded (#12072, #12105)

🔐 Security and PKI

• Faster encrypted packets with a shared-secret cache (#11979)
• nRF52840 now runs X25519 and Ed25519 verification on the CC310 hardware crypto engine (#12098)
• Relays no longer rewrite NodeInfo or NeighborInfo payloads (#12088, #12090)
• Imported private keys are clamped before the public key is derived (#12095)
• Further hardening against incoming packets with spoofed own node num (#12270)

🐧 meshtasticd (Linux / Raspberry Pi)

• BLE peripheral support via BlueZ: connect the phone apps directly to a Pi node (#11396)
• DMShell: remote shell over the mesh, with an on-board test client (#11976, #12111)
• Native mDNS discovery via Avahi and Bonjour (#12032, #12142)
• Host notifications (#10216)
• Admin keys in config.yaml, no longer limited to three (#12056)
• Faster CH341 USB radio handling (#12013, #12016)
• Adafruit Arcade Bonnet input (#12116)

🖥️ Displays

• InkHUD: offline maps from an SD card (#12118), plus an InkHUD port for the ThinkNode M5 (#12097)
• Ethernet status is now shown on the WiFi screen (#11991)

🔧 New and improved hardware

• New boards:
  • Makerfabs Nomad Terminal (#12112)
  • RAK WisMesh Dongle (#12009)
  • Nodara nRF52840 (#12211)
• RAK2560 WisMesh Hub SensorHub uplink (#11817)
• T-Beam 1W now supports the LR1121 and LR2021 modules (#12204)
• GPS updates for ThinkNode M5 and M8, Wio Tracker L2 fixes, and the Meshnology W12 front end (#12113, #12151, #12133, #12238)

🩹 Notable fixes

• Fixed an ESP32 light-sleep crash caused by a DIO1 interrupt storm (#12131)
• Fixed a crash when enabling Store & Forward after a boot with it disabled (#12168)
• Deferred NodeDB saves are no longer dropped (#11930)
• ESP32 shutdown and BLE OTA DFU reliability fixes (#12159, #12220)

🚀 Big changes

[!WARNING] New US nodes now default to LongTurbo, not LongFast. Only applies to first-time region selection on the device screen. LongTurbo and LongFast can't hear each other. You will need to switch the preset back to LongFast to join an existing mesh on the prior default. (#11637)

A problem was found in the 2.8.0 packet signing code. 2.8.0 has been revoked, and 2.8.1 signatures are not compatible with the revoked 2.8.0 firmware.

[!IMPORTANT] If you hit a bootloop or repeated crashes after upgrading, we recommend a full erase and flash. Export your config first to backup first, if you have any important settings you want to save.

There are a number of fundamental changes to 2.8 that require a heads-up. Please review some of these higher profile changes so that you are aware of them before installing:

• Node numbers (ID) are now derived from the public-key identity of the node instead of hardware mac address
• XEdDSA based packet signing
• Reduction of long-name to 25 bytes
• Precise position no longer allowed on known-keys (public mesh. Please use private channels for this)
• Telemetry and position are off-by-default and must be opted into
• Ground-up redesigned NodeDB storage and traffic management
• Completely new allocation of LoRa Regions and presets, including ham specific carve-outs
• Signing acks with the Ack_proof field

Other high-impact changes

Radio & mesh protocol

• Packet Signing via XEdDSA (#10478) plus a BaseUI signing status UI (#10841), unsigned-packet policy hardening with test coverage (#10858), and runtime-toggleable MESHTASTIC_LOCKDOWN hardening for nRF52 (#10349, opt-in via #10712).
• Sign the whole Data envelope, in one unambiguous layout by @jp-bennett in https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/pull/11422
• Send an ack over PKC when no channel can carry it by @jp-bennett in https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/pull/11891
• Traffic Management Module for packet forwarding — dedup, rate limiting, role-aware policing (#9358 base, #10706 dedup/rate-limit expansion, #10745 next-hop cache overflow store, #9921 congestion-aware position interval/hop-exhaustion tuning).
• Automatic variable hop limits based on live mesh activity and message-size estimation (#10176).
• Mesh beacon feature and admin controls (#10618 base implementation, #10839 second pass adding beacon admin/config).
• Noise floor tracking with a sliding-window estimate (#9347).
• Hash table index for O(1) packet history lookups — improves routing/dedup performance on busy meshes (#9499).
• New amateur-radio regions: 70cm (#10627), 1.25m/125cm (#10638), 2m/~144MHz (#10623); EU regions merge plus Narrow/Lite region enablement for EU (#10675, #10120); LoRa region preset map for cleaner per-region defaults (#10736).
• TinyFast and TinySlow modem presets added to config and menu (#10597).
• LoRa config changes now apply live without a reboot (#9962); LoRa settings expansion and validation improvements (#9878).
• Position privacy: direct-send position packets are clamped to channel precision (#10383), and public/known-key position precision is clamped similarly (#10665) and honors explicit channel settings to prevent location leaks (#10513).
• Licensed operators are now prevented from rebroadcasting packets to/from unlicensed users, for regulatory compliance (#9958).
• Packets with missing/invalid hop_start (pre-hop firmware) are now deprecated/blocked (#9476).
• Spoof detection added for UDP multicast packets (#9905).
• Low-bandwidth conversion support added to MeshRadio (#10595).
• ATAK Plugin V2 implemented (drops legacy unishox2 compression) (#10105), including TAKTALK voice/text chat message and room data structures.
• Ethernet HTTP/HTTPS API server ported to RP2350 + W5500 boards (#10573), plus Ethernet OTA support for RP2350/W5500 (#10136).
• Optional LED_LORA indicator to show LoRa TX activity (#10465), and a

🚀 Big changes

[!WARNING] New US nodes now default to LongTurbo, not LongFast. Only applies to first-time region selection on the device screen. LongTurbo and LongFast can't hear each other. You will need to switch the preset back to LongFast to join an existing mesh on the prior default. (#11637)

[!IMPORTANT] If you hit a bootloop or repeated crashes after upgrading, we recommend a full erase and flash. Export your config first to backup first, if you have any important settings you want to save.

There are a number of fundamental changes to 2.8 that require a heads-up. Please review some of these higher profile changes so that you are aware of them before installing:

• Node numbers (ID) are now derived from the public-key identity of the node instead of hardware mac address
• XEdDSA based packet signing
• Reduction of long-name to 25 bytes
• Precise position no longer allowed on known-keys (public mesh. Please use private channels for this)
• Telemetry and position are off-by-default and must be opted into
• Ground-up redesigned NodeDB storage and traffic management
• Completely new allocation of LoRa Regions and presets, including ham specific carve-outs

Other high-impact changes

Radio & mesh protocol

• Packet Signing via XEdDSA (#10478) plus a BaseUI signing status UI (#10841), unsigned-packet policy hardening with test coverage (#10858), and runtime-toggleable MESHTASTIC_LOCKDOWN hardening for nRF52 (#10349, opt-in via #10712).
• Traffic Management Module for packet forwarding — dedup, rate limiting, role-aware policing (#9358 base, #10706 dedup/rate-limit expansion, #10745 next-hop cache overflow store, #9921 congestion-aware position interval/hop-exhaustion tuning).
• Automatic variable hop limits based on live mesh activity and message-size estimation (#10176).
• Mesh beacon feature and admin controls (#10618 base implementation, #10839 second pass adding beacon admin/config).
• Noise floor tracking with a sliding-window estimate (#9347).
• Hash table index for O(1) packet history lookups — improves routing/dedup performance on busy meshes (#9499).
• New amateur-radio regions: 70cm (#10627), 1.25m/125cm (#10638), 2m/~144MHz (#10623); EU regions merge plus Narrow/Lite region enablement for EU (#10675, #10120); LoRa region preset map for cleaner per-region defaults (#10736).
• TinyFast and TinySlow modem presets added to config and menu (#10597).
• LoRa config changes now apply live without a reboot (#9962); LoRa settings expansion and validation improvements (#9878).
• Position privacy: direct-send position packets are clamped to channel precision (#10383), and public/known-key position precision is clamped similarly (#10665) and honors explicit channel settings to prevent location leaks (#10513).
• Licensed operators are now prevented from rebroadcasting packets to/from unlicensed users, for regulatory compliance (#9958).
• Packets with missing/invalid hop_start (pre-hop firmware) are now deprecated/blocked (#9476).
• Spoof detection added for UDP multicast packets (#9905).
• Low-bandwidth conversion support added to MeshRadio (#10595).
• ATAK Plugin V2 implemented (drops legacy unishox2 compression) (#10105), including TAKTALK voice/text chat message and room data structures.
• Ethernet HTTP/HTTPS API server ported to RP2350 + W5500 boards (#10573), plus Ethernet OTA support for RP2350/W5500 (#10136).
• Optional LED_LORA indicator to show LoRa TX activity (#10465), and an LED indicator for LoRa RX (#10674).
• GPS time sync: device now sets its clock from GPS every 30 minutes (#10737); GPS is skipped at startup if the LoRa region is unset, to save battery (#10386); GPS model/baudrate now cached across reboots to skip a full sweep (#10544).
• Config: position & telemetry broadcast are now opt-in rather than always-on (#10929).

UI / display — BaseUI

*BaseUI is the current default graphical UI (`

[!WARNING] This initial cut of 2.8.0 was revoked due to issues encountered with LR1110 initialization. This became apparent on T1000-E devices after a fresh flash. Please download https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/releases/tag/v2.8.0.47db0e3 instead.