Stackers Network Digest — October 11, 2025

The Big Picture

With 2025.2 Flamingo just shipped and the OpenInfra Summit Europe imminent, this was a transitional week: light on big announcements, heavy on PTG preparation, stable-branch housekeeping, and a steady drip of operator troubleshooting. The most consequential governance items were the formal moves to mark Venus and Vitrage inactive, and the most concrete deadline was 2024.1 Caracal's transition to Unmaintained on October 24. A standout technical thread explored whether Nova should support hardware-backed SSH keys (FIDO/Yubikey). R-24/R-25 to 2026.1 Gazpacho.

Heads Up / Action Needed

2024.1 Caracal transitions to Unmaintained on October 24. Előd Illés notified PTLs: the final-release-before-EOM etherpad lists open/unreleased changes on stable/2024.1 per repo. After tagging 2024.1-eom and cutting unmaintained/2024.1, no official releases will follow — the branch reverts to community bug-fix territory only. Library maintainers especially should wrap up to avoid broken final releases. Reference: stable-branches policy.

Release countdown resumes at R-24. Thierry Carrez relaunched the countdown emails: 2026.1 Gazpacho final release April 1, 2026 — and he confirmed that's not a joke.

User Survey project questions: feedback by December 1. Jimmy McArthur shared the 2025 anonymized User Survey feedback spreadsheet. PTLs, TC, and WG leads should review and update the 2026 questions; absence of response will be treated as no change. InteropWG-related questions will be dropped given the group's dissolution.

Governance & Community

Venus and Vitrage proposed inactive. Goutham Pacha Ravi formalized the moves — governance 963228 (Venus) and 963227 (Vitrage). Inactive means no Gazpacho regular releases (maintainer-requested releases still possible); if no activity returns, the projects move to retirement per the dropping-projects guidelines. PTL volunteers welcomed.

TC weekly summary (R-25). Michał Nasiadka (mnasiadka) is the new TC Vice-Chair and will lead the alternate APAC-friendly weekly meeting (still firming up). Felipe Reyes (freyes) was appointed PTL of OpenStack Charms. Monasca's "inactive" status was extended through 2025.2, with retirement imminent. The committee is preparing PTG sessions and inviting topics on the TC etherpad.

List moderation reminder. Jeremy Stanley posted administrivia on moderation and duplicate posts — worth a glance if you've been bouncing off Mailman.

Development & Technical Decisions

Yubikey / FIDO SSH keys in Nova keypairs. Ivan Marton asked whether sk-ssh-ed25519@openssh.com (and related hardware-backed key formats) are supported by the keypairs endpoint. The 13-message thread surfaced concrete blockers including the terraform-provider-openstack issue 1555, a requirements patch, and the pysaml2 dependency situation. This is now likely PTG-bound and overlaps with the broader Keystone modernization discussion.

Nova: limiting attached devices to avoid KVM IRQ-route exhaustion. Pavlo Shchelokovskyy described a real-world crash: a fat VM (100 cores, virtio-net multiqueue, ~20 NICs) hits KVM's KVM_MAX_IRQ_ROUTES 4096, each new NIC adding ~200 interrupts. The trigger was in-guest CNI-like automation attaching NICs in response to external events. He's asking whether Nova should expose a flavor/extra-spec or instance-metadata knob to hard-cap attached devices. Worth tracking into the Nova PTG.

Neutron oslo.messaging port-notification broadcast. Arnaud Morin pointed at oslo.messaging patch 963475 as a potential lever.

Ironic: anyone still using PReP partitioning? Julia Kreger sounded out PowerPC users on whether IPA's PReP partition support is still needed — a "should we keep PReP?" question is on the Ironic PTG agenda.

Operator Notes

Swift via Kolla-Ansible at scale. Sara Khosravi shared a detailed write-up of separating Swift traffic out of the main load balancer using Kolla-Ansible's "Advanced" Swift configuration (dedicated proxy nodes and a secondary HAProxy), explaining how the Keystone endpoint behavior changes between the Normal and Advanced architectures. A useful reference for anyone running large-object workloads under unified lifecycle management.

OpenStack-Ansible 2025.1: upper-constraints fetch fails with SSL verification error. Operator hit CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED retrieving constraints from releases.openstack.org — almost always a missing CA bundle on the deployer node (see curl's SSL certs notes referenced in the thread).

OpenStack-Ansible networking design questions. A new operator working with a four-host topology (2 infra + 2 compute) walked through their VLAN layout (management, tunnel, storage) and HAProxy/Keepalived VIP plan, looking for sanity-check input on openstack_user_config.yml and netplan choices.

Octavia health-check failures and "unable to create new instance" debugging threads also ran. Bernd Bausch's reply on the latter is a good reminder to check nova-conductor.log for Binding failed for port ... Neutron-side issues — and a gentle nudge to use DevStack or Kolla instead of AI-generated install scripts.

Project Operations

Nova upstream meeting reschedule poll. René Ribaud is moving the Nova meeting time — vote at framadate.

Kolla weekly meetings cancelled Oct 8 and Oct 15 (key participants away, then OpenInfra Summit week). Neutron Drivers meeting cancelled October 10; topics should go directly to the Neutron PTG etherpad. Public Cloud SIG met as usual on October 8 with Kees Meijs out (most attendees were heading to Paris-Saclay).

Neutron bug deputy week 40 — Lajos Katona's report; high-priority items to be triaged at the next team meeting.