The Big Picture

This was a bridge week between the OpenInfra Summit Europe in Paris-Saclay and the virtual PTG (Oct 27-31). With most of the community either traveling or heads-down on operations, the list skewed heavily toward hands-on troubleshooting — NUMA scheduling, OVN live-migration outages, Glance image uploads — punctuated by PTG scheduling and a few governance and review-attention asks. The single most actionable item for operators: Caracal (2024.1) reached its planned transition to Unmaintained on October 24.

Releases & Announcements

The TC's R-24 weekly summary set the stage: 24 weeks to the Gazpacho release, with a meet-and-greet planned between the TC and Summit attendees on Sunday October 19. The TC reported no major governance merges that week but several proposals in review — including the formal moves to mark Venus and Vitrage inactive, and the still-stalled Monasca retirement (awaiting a potential new maintainer). Discussions continued on a new APAC-friendly TC meeting slot, with the first such meeting expected shortly after the Summit, and on refreshing TC liaisons for Freezer, Oslo, Release Management, and Requirements.

Elod Illes's earlier notice came due this week: stable/2024.1 Caracal transitions to Unmaintained on October 24, tagged 2024.1-eom. After tagging, there are no further official Caracal point releases — only bug fixes on the unmaintained branch. Teams should have wrapped any final releases (libraries first) before the cutover.

Development & Technical Decisions

NUMA scheduling remained the operator pain point of the week. Brijesh Mishra's Nova NUMA thread (Kolla-Ansible Caracal) ran on: without hw:numa_nodes='2' the scheduler packs VMs onto one socket and underutilizes the other, but enabling it always spreads vCPUs even when a single node would fit — at a 20-30% memory-performance cost from cross-NUMA access. Operators want conditional placement (single-node when possible, spread only when necessary), and the topic clearly needs a Nova design conversation at the PTG.

OVN live-migration switchover outages drew a detailed report from Kamil Madac: a Wallaby TripleO deployment sees 10-40 seconds of provider-network connectivity loss during live migration, with no errors in ovn-controller/nova/neutron logs. He notes OVN multi-chassis port bindings weren't implemented in Wallaby and that the same workload behaves fine on a 2024.2 Kolla-Ansible cloud — a useful cautionary data point for anyone still on older OVN, and a nudge toward upgrading for migration stability.

Review-attention requests piled up. Mohammed Naser pressed again for reviews of dormant ovn-bgp-agent backports and the larger driver-ecosystem rework (some patches now in merge conflict after months of waiting), warning against the ecosystem becoming downstream-best-only. He and Dong Ma also chased the Horizon team to review the month-old Nova live-migration microversion patch (961099). On the Skyline front, Goutham Pacha Ravi continued the conversation around Reet Srivastava's core self-nomination, again recommending a PTG session to gather the project's prospective maintainers — a recurring signal that Skyline needs more hands.

Operator debugging filled out the week: a long thread on setting an admin password at server-create time (without a user-data file) wrestled with cloud-init/virt-customize limitations and forked into the security-SIG warning against passwords in metadata; Eugen Block's Glance ISO upload failure after the Epoxy upgrade ("Multiple formats detected: iso,gpt," 415 Unsupported Media Type) continued, with the require_image_format_match = false workaround in play and a suspected bug; and Winicius Allan raised the openstacksdk vs Compute-API host-filter inconsistency (compute_host in SDK docs vs host in the API; bug 2101016). Pavlo Shchelokovskyy's NIC/IRQ-exhaustion device-limit thread and Eugen Block's persistent-PXE-boot request both carried over from prior weeks.

Security

The "Don't put passwords in instance metadata" guidance (security-sig, with Sean Mooney and Jeremy Stanley) recurred as the admin-password thread surfaced the anti-pattern again. The takeaway for operators stands: instance metadata and config-drive are not safe channels for secrets.

Heads Up / Action Needed

• Caracal EOM landed October 24 — confirm you've taken any final stable/2024.1 releases you need; the branch is now unmaintained.
• Stalled reviews need eyes: ovn-bgp-agent series (Mohammed Naser) and Horizon patch 961099 (Nova live-migration microversion) are both being actively requested.
• Neutron specs need updates/reviews ahead of the PTG (Brian Haley), with open specs tracked in Gerrit.
• PTG is next week (Oct 27-31): finalize team schedules and confirm cross-project slots.

Community & Events

Meeting cancellations clustered around the Summit/PTG window: Neutron Drivers and CI meetings (resuming Nov 3), Kolla, and Tacker. Neutron bug-deputy reports (Rodolfo Alonso Hernandez, Lajos Katona) flagged a cluster of VPNaaS bugs — AttributeError, broken Libreswan config with new AEAD ciphers, ovn-vpn-agent delete failures — with patches proposed, plus broken OVN CI jobs on Ironic (now fixed). The Skyline core-reviewer nomination thread continued. With Summit trip reports and PTG planning dominating, expect next week's digest to pivot to design-discussion outcomes.