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February 21, 2026

Stackers Network Digest — February 21, 2026

27 threads · 34 messages · openstack-announce, openstack-discuss

The Big Picture

The week was framed by election logistics and gates that wouldn't stay green. PTL/TC nominations closed on Feb 18, the new Technical Committee was announced Feb 25, and PTL voting opened for the only two contested races (Barbican and Horizon). In parallel, projects scrambled with last-minute candidacies (Watcher, CloudKitty), CIVS opt-in reminders, and yet another wave of CI breakage from upstream Python tooling. A revised Nova security advisory clarified a CVE identifier just as the release calendar started ticking towards R-5.

Releases & Announcements

The 2026.2 "Hibiscus" Technical Committee is seated. Ian Y. Choi announced the five elected members: Amy Marrich (spotz), Dan Smith (dansmith), Goutham Pacha Ravi (gouthamr), Michal Nasiadka (mnasiadka), and Dmitriy Rabotyagov (noonedeadpunk). PTL voting opened the same day for Barbican and Horizon, running until March 18, 23:45 UTC. All other PTLs were decided by acclaim or remain in a leadership reset.

Late-week candidacies fleshed out the picture: Rafael Weingärtner stood for another term as CloudKitty PTL (he has held the role since Victoria), and Douglas Viroel put himself forward for Watcher PTL, outlining priorities around eventlet removal (with native threads becoming the default in 2026.2), osprofiler-based performance work, OpenStack SDK migration, and expanded functional test coverage.

Security

OSSA-2026-002 / CVE-2026-24708 — Nova, errata 1. Jeremy Stanley issued an errata correcting the CVE identifier on the previously announced Nova resize vulnerability. Dan Smith (Red Hat) had reported that a malicious QCOW header on a root or ephemeral disk, combined with a resize, could convince Nova's Flat image backend to call qemu-img without a format restriction, performing an unsafe resize that could destroy data on the host. Only compute nodes using the Flat backend (typically use_cow_images=False) are affected (Nova <30.2.2, >=31.0.0 <31.2.1, >=32.0.0 <32.1.1). The errata's key point: CVE-2026-24708 is the correct identifier, not CVE-2026-24709. Patches are posted for dalmatian, epoxy, flamingo, and gazpacho. If you run the Flat image backend, patch.

Development & Technical Decisions

CI kept breaking and the team kept holding rechecks. Takashi Kajinami flagged consistent POST_FAILURE in openstack-tox-py310 (and other py310 jobs), traced to a testtools regression and fixed in testtools 2.8.4 — but the CI image still needed rebuilding to pull the fix, so the standing advice was to avoid mass rechecks until the status was verified. This came on top of the ongoing setuptools pkg_resources fallout, which (per the TC's R-6 summary) required resurrecting x-static repositories so the Horizon team could work around upstream Python changes; Stephen Finucane's proactive work was credited with keeping the situation from being far worse.

nova-live-migration-ceph failing 100%. melanie witt reported the job failing in the post stage on master since Feb 12, citing missing virtlockd services on the controller during teardown — likely tied to a recent devstack-plugin-ceph change.

A multi-cell Nova test environment stumps an operator. Tyler Wilson hit CantStartEngineError: No sql_connection parameter is established when live-migrating in a two-cell setup, with no visible activity in the cell conductors — a classic multi-cell database-connection-string puzzle that drew help from the list.

Heads Up / Action Needed

  • PTL/TC nominations closed Feb 18, 23:45 UTC. As of the R-6 summary, 27 project teams still lacked a PTL nominee, prompting a final wave of self-nominations.
  • CIVS opt-in required. To vote in private CIVS polls you must opt in your Gerrit email before the election started Feb 25, 23:45 UTC.
  • PTG team sign-up due March 1, 7:00 UTC. Kendall Nelson reminded teams that loading the roster in at once makes PTGbot scheduling much cleaner ahead of April 20–24.
  • Masakari at risk. With no PTL nominee by deadline, Sei Sano publicly urged the outgoing PTL to self-nominate, warning the project could be marked inactive — even as team members noted renewed momentum.

Community & Events

The TC's R-6 notes recorded two contrasting outcomes for "leaderless" cleanup: Monasca was officially closed (173 open changes abandoned across its repositories), while Cyborg is reviving with a new PTL nominee and fresh team structure. The TC also proposed PTL-nomination directories for the Requirements and Oslo teams — not just to solicit candidates, but to spark a discussion on how the community better supports its critical dependency libraries.

The Digital Sovereignty WG posted its Feb 19 meeting recording and a clear ask: Allison Price and Kendall Nelson are drafting sample landing-page stances and need community feedback; case studies should start now ahead of a March 20-ish launch. René Ribaud asked the Nova team to explicitly reserve 10–15 minutes per meeting for bug scrubbing, with questions prepared in advance. Brian Rosmaita ran the bi-monthly Cinder Festival of Reviews on Feb 20; the Neutron Drivers meeting was canceled for lack of agenda.

A couple of operator how-tos rounded out the week: Vincent Lee walked through a kolla-ansible Flamingo Ironic baremetal setup, asking for guidance on DHCP/PXE wiring; Sergey Korobitsin chimed in on an OVS-to-OVN migration thread. The Neutron bug deputy report for Feb 9–16 was light but notable: Neutron cleaning OVN static routes it doesn't own, allowed-address-pair VMAC issues on ML2/OVN, and an RFE for OVN BFD presets.