Yes that will happen: https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/wiki/Roadmap7.0 But not any time soon. Basically we will support an "extended" version of the JPA orm.xml schema that introduces Hibernate specific concepts. Historically we stayed away from that because IMO it really is against the spirit, in not the letter, of the JPA spec. However, IIUC this is exactly what other JPA providers do. So we will go that route. For a short time we will continue to support hbm.xml files even after 7.0 *to a point*. There are certain hbm.xml concepts that simply do not map well to JPA - things JPA handles differently. The main one that comes to mind is property-ref. There will be a "converter" for converting hbm.xml -> orm.xml. The intention is to allow build-time conversion of hbm.xml files to the corresponding orm.xml. For a short time we will continue to support that conversion on the fly at runtime too. Handling of any non-supported constructs (property-ref, e.g.) is still being discussed. For sure as part of the on-the-fly runtime conversion it wouyld result in an exception. For the build-time tool though we'd ideally inject a comment of some sort into the generated file and log a warning; the difficulty with that is that JAXB (to my limited knowledge, at least) does not provide a way to inject an XML comment somewhere in the doc. Also, keep in mind that a lot of this conversion work is already done on a branch. Ideally I would love to offer the "extended orm.xml" feature in 6.x (for some x > 0). So even as part of 6.x you'd be able to play around with that. TBD exactly when we'd drop support for hbm.xml altogether; obviously some point after 7 On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 8:46 AM Koen Serneels <ks(a)error.be&gt; wrote: