Hi MXNet community,

Now that the 1.7.0 release development is closed (and in the midst of the release process), I wanted to start a discussion around another 1.x based release. There are many users that will continue to use 1.x for the foreseeable future while the community transitions to 2.x. Some examples are those who are using toolkits (ie. GluonCV/NLP/etc.) that are pinned to a 1.x version of MXNet.

Are there features that we want to make available in a 1.8.0 release while the 2.0 transition is ongoing?

Feature freeze (code freeze) was September 18th.

Deferred items

• [Backport 1.x] Update to thrust 1.9.8 on Windows (#18218) #18977 [@stu1130 has CI failures]

Completed items

• [v1.x] backport Invoke mkldnn and cudnn BatchNorm when axis != 1 #18890 [@stu1130 merged]
• [v1.x] backport remove upper bound (#18857) #18910 [@wkcn merged]
• [1.x][submodule] Upgrade to oneDNN v1.6.1 #18867 [@bartekkuncer merged]
• [1.x] Backporting backward attributes inference from master #18895 [@Kh4L merged]
• [1.x] Backporting TensorRT-Gluon Partition API (and TensorRT 7 support) #18916 [@Kh4L merged]
• [1.x] Backporting #18779 to v1.x #18894 [@samskalicky merged]
• [1.x] Backport: Change Partition API's options_map to std::unordered_map #18929 #18964 [@Kh4L merged]
• 1.x: Stop packaging GPL libquadmath.so #19055 [@leezu merged]
• [v1.x] Update onnx support to work with onnx 1.7.0 with most CV models #19017 [@josephevans merged]
• [1.x] Fix race condition in NaiveEngine::PushAsync #19122 [@leezu merged]
• [1.x] TensorRT: add INT8 with calibration #19011 [@Kh4L merged]
• [1.x] Backport 'Update CUB and include it only for CUDA < 11 #18799' #18975 [@Kh4L merged]
• [1.x] Backport Fix for duplicate subgraph inputs/outputs (#16131) #19112 [@samskalicky merged]
• [1.x] Backport of intgemm #17559 #19099 [@kpuatamazon CI failures]
• Add cmake flag USE_FATBIN_COMPRESSION, ON by default #19123 [@DickJC123 merged]
• [v1.8][Port PR] Port padding fix #19167 [@sxjscience merged]
• [1.x] Backport Add cmake flag USE_FATBIN_COMPRESSION, ON by default (#19123) #19158 [@DickJC123 waiting on CI]
• [v1.x] Add new CI pipeline for building and testing with cuda 11.0. #19149 [@josephevans merged]
• [v1.x] Backport Unittest tolerance handling improvements (#18694). Also test seeding (#18762). #19148 [@DickJC123 merged]
• [v1.x] Backport Improve environment variable handling in unittests (#18424) #19173 [@DickJC123 merged]
• [1.x][FEATURE] CUDA graphs support #19142 [@ptrendx merged]