The Big Picture

OpenStack 2025.2 "Flamingo" shipped on October 1 — the project's 32nd release — and with it the openstack/releases repository reopened for the 2026.1 "Gazpacho" cycle, lifting all freezes. The week's other dominant theme was preparation: Thierry Carrez restarted the release countdown emails, packaging and deployment teams began testing Flamingo, and the whole community shifted toward planning the upcoming October 27-31 PTG. Two leaderless projects, Venus and Vitrage, moved closer to inactive status.

Releases & Announcements

Elod Illes announced the final Flamingo releases on both openstack-announce and openstack-discuss. stable/2025.2 is now a normal stable branch under standard stable policy, and the Gazpacho releases repo is open with freezes lifted. The full component list lives at releases.openstack.org/flamingo/. The OpenInfra Foundation assembled a release highlights page, and contributors discussed the release on OpenInfra Live.

Thierry Carrez sent the first release countdown for week R-24, confirming the Gazpacho cycle concludes with a final release on April 1, 2026 ("not a joke"). The TC's R-25 summary reinforced that Gazpacho is a SLURP release with a heavy technical-debt focus, welcomed Michal Nasiadka (mnasiadka) as the new TC Vice-Chair, and noted the TC is exploring an Eastern-Hemisphere-friendly alternate weekly meeting slot that mnasiadka would lead. The TC also appointed Felipe Reyes (freyes) as PTL for OpenStack Charms.

Elod Illes flagged a stable-branch milestone for operators: 2024.1 Caracal transitions to Unmaintained at the end of October (planned 2025-10-24). Teams wanting a final Caracal point release should wrap up open/unreleased stable/2024.1 changes first — the branch will be tagged 2024.1-eom, after which there are no more official Caracal releases (only bug fixes on the unmaintained branch). He stressed wrapping up libraries first to avoid broken final releases.

Development & Technical Decisions

Venus and Vitrage edged toward retirement. Goutham Pacha Ravi bumped both PTL-volunteer threads, with governance patches proposing each team be marked "inactive." Inactive status means no regular 2026.1 releases are tagged, and continued inactivity through the cycle leads to deliverable retirement. Maintainers can still request releases or switch to Distributed Project Leadership — but the window is closing.

Nova device-limit safety came up as a real-world failure mode. Pavlo Shchelokovskyy described a "fat VM" (100 cores, virtio-net multiqueue) that crashes QEMU with a kvm_irqchip_commit_routes assertion when attaching roughly the 20th NIC — the guest hits the KVM KVM_MAX_IRQ_ROUTES limit of 4096 IRQs, made worse by CNI-like in-guest automation hot-plugging NICs. He's asking whether Nova should offer a knob (flavor extra spec or instance metadata) to hard-limit attached devices and prevent self-destructing instances, rather than counting IRQs itself. A useful discussion-starter for the Nova team heading into the PTG.

Michael Still kicked off a Kolla build-mirror abstraction proposal: as part of bringing his SPICE native console proxy work to Kolla-Ansible, he noted that the most common cause of failed Kolla image builds is flaky/rate-limited upstream package repos, and proposed centrally defining build dependency sources so operators can override them with local mirrors. He floated the kolla-build Ansible role defaults as a home for the list and asked the Kolla team for guidance.

Operator troubleshooting filled out the rest: an OpenStack-Ansible deployment hit CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED retrieving upper-constraints over HTTPS during setup-infrastructure (a TLS/CA trust issue on the deploy host), and a multi-VLAN OSA networking design review continued across threads. Sara Khosravi shared a detailed decoupled-Swift architecture for Kolla-Ansible (dedicated secondary load balancer and proxy nodes for object-storage traffic) and invited feedback. Ivan Marton opened a well-attended thread asking whether Nova keypairs will support sk-ssh-ed25519 (YubiKey-backed) SSH key formats — a roadmap question for hardware-token users. Jeremy Stanley posted administrivia reminding the list about moderation and duplicate posts after some cross-posting noise.

Heads Up / Action Needed

• Caracal EOM is October 24: land final stable/2024.1 changes before the branch transitions to Unmaintained.
• PTG planning is in full swing: Iury Gregory is coordinating Ironic cross-project sessions with Nova and Cinder (Graphical Console follow-up, NVMe-over-TCP) and with Neutron (VXLAN attachments) — interested teams should claim slots via #openstack-ironic.
• User Survey project feedback: Jimmy McArthur asked PTLs/TC/WG leads to review anonymized 2025 User Survey feedback and update their survey questions by December 1 (e.g., removing the disbanded InteropWG questions).
• Anonymized survey + contributor surveys: Jeremy Stanley again pushed the Flamingo retrospective Maintainer and Contributor Experience surveys ahead of the PTG.

Community & Events

The OpenInfra Summit Europe in Paris-Saclay was imminent (October 17-19), with the Ironic community organizing a Friday-night dinner. Ildiko Vancsa warned of a short Bitergia metrics dashboard outage for maintenance (Oct 6-7, data resuming Oct 8). Several teams pre-emptively cancelled meetings for Summit/PTG proximity: Ironic (Oct 13, 20, 27), Kolla (Oct 8, 15), Blazar (Oct 16), and Neutron Drivers. Rene Ribaud opened a poll to reschedule the Nova upstream meeting around daylight-saving shifts, and Julia Kreger asked whether anyone still uses Ironic's PReP partitioning support on Power hardware — a data-gathering question tied to a PTG topic.