Release Plan: v0.37, v0.38, and beyond

[phip1611]

We discovered quite a few things that we want to optimize. This is our release plan for the upcoming weeks/months:

✅ Plan for v0.37 (2026-03-22)

• We already have quite a few items on our list
  • Changelog uefi
  • Changelog uefi-raw
• Additionally, I'd like to ship
  • uefi: significantly improve ergonomics of Handle (device path and component2 protocols) #1858
  • uefi: boot: improve documentation for handles #1877
  • uefi: serial: improve overall documentation #1874
  • uefi: serial: add read_exact() and write_exact() + fix core::fmt::Write for Serial #1875
  • uefi-raw & uefi: serial: add support for protocol revision 1.1 #1873
  • uefi-raw: serial: fix mutability #1872
  • uefi: Add device path generation for discovered devices in a PciTree #1831
  • runtime: add CStr16::from_bytes_with_nul for UCS-2 strings in UEFI Variables #1915

Open Technical Debt, Ideas for Refactorings, and Other Major Improvements

1. Refactor most of <P: ProtocolPointer> to functions that just consume a &Guid
   • although very breaking also very easy to fix by passing &P::GUID
2. find_handles shoult return empty vec instead of Status::NOT_FOUND error
   • ticket find_handles(): should return empty vec instead of Status::NotFound #1854
   • while on it, we should think about consolidating all our find_handles functions
   • my suggestion: two methods to rule them all. one heap based, one with external buffer
   • deprecate the others, remove them in a following release
3. refactor device paths: UEFI heap vs Rust heap
   • we are very inconsistent with Box<u8> and PoolDevicePath
   • we should figure out what we want and then streamline the code
4. refactor protocol opening to Result<Option<ScopedProtocol>>
   • ticket: Add open_protocol_opt() helpers #1867
5. Improve device path construction
   • ticket: 1817

Plan for v0.38

• implement (1): breaking
• implement (2): new helpers and deprecate old ones
  • otherwise, upgrade path would be tricky
• Feat: IoMmu protocol #1728
• Implement memory management and mapping functions for PCI Root bridge io protocols #1724
• uefi: Add integration with crates jiff and time for struct Time #1911

Plan for v0.39

• implement (3): breaking
• implement (4): breaking

Plan for v0.40

• implement (5): breaking