The Big Picture

This was the final week before the 2026.1 "Gazpacho" release (R-1), and the tone was a mix of last-minute release jitters and quiet confidence. The most consequential thread was a release-blocking question from Dmitriy Rabotyagov: does Glance actually work with a Swift backend in 2026.1? Meanwhile the longer arcs of OpenStack's modernization — eventlet removal, post-quantum cryptography, and a contested community metrics dashboard — all advanced. With no security advisories this week, the practical headline is testing: validate Glance+Swift and the Swift eventlet-removal branch before they bite you in production.

Heads Up / Action Needed

Glance + Swift may be broken in 2026.1. Days before release, Rabotyagov reported that with Glance on a Swift backend, image upload works fine but download (and therefore booting instances from those images) crashes the Glance WSGI process with a sha512 checksum mismatch and a 502. The same image downloads cleanly via the Swift client with a matching checksum, and Ceph/File backends are unaffected — strongly suggesting a Glance-side bug specific to the Swift driver. It reproduces constantly in OpenStack-Ansible CI. If you run Glance-on-Swift, test image download on 2026.1 before upgrading.

Tempest gate was blocked this week — Ghanshyam Maan reported tempest-tox-plugin-sanity-check failing 100% and asked everyone to hold rechecks until the fix (review 982305) merged. He separately moved grenade jobs on stable/2025.2 and stable/2026.1 onto Ubuntu Noble (they'd been left on Jammy) and asked projects to test and report issues.

Windows storage performance. Joel McLean documented a reproducible ~70% slowdown for Windows guests on Ceph RBD versus Linux guests with identical flavors and volume types (a MySQL index-creation job taking 29 min on Windows 2025 vs 17 min on Ubuntu 24), tracing it to how Windows + virtio consumes storage. Multiple virtio-win driver versions and both vioscsi and viostor made little difference. If you run Windows workloads on Cinder/Ceph, this is a known pain point worth tracking upstream.

Development & Technical Decisions

Eventlet removal reaches Swift. Christian Schwede posted a concrete status on the Swift eventlet-removal series: with the patches applied, Swift runs on Gunicorn with threading (when eventlet is disabled via USE_EVENTLET=0). Functional tests pass 100%, unit tests ~99%, probe tests ~97%. He provided clear instructions for testing via the feature/threaded branch or a Swift-All-In-One deployment. This is a call for testing — the most actionable way to help one of OpenStack's biggest long-term cleanups.

Post-quantum cryptography is moving from talk to governance. Maurício Harley confirmed he'll submit a PQC pop-up team governance patch to openstack/governance (Gerrit topic pqc-migration), with a charter, scope, and member list. His framing is pragmatic: PQC adoption should be opt-in and backward-compatible (hybrid key exchange, like the TLS ecosystem), and much of the upstream work is removing barriers — code that pins protocol versions or doesn't configure key-exchange groups — rather than implementing crypto, since OpenSSL 3.5 already ships ML-KEM and ML-DSA.

Horizon plugin coupling. Radomir Dopieralski published a detailed audit of which Horizon plugins import from the openstack_dashboard package rather than the intended horizon/openstack_auth libraries. The dependency on openstack_dashboard.api is the worrying one, since that code is slated for a rewrite onto openstack_sdk away from the deprecated python-*client libraries — plugins relying on it risk breakage. He's asking plugin developers to weigh in. Lajos Katona responded for the Neutron-adjacent dashboards, noting they're maintained reactively with original developers gone.

Ironic driver removals. Jay Faulkner formally proposed removing the legacy iLO driver in 2026.2 (joining the already-queued iRMC and SNMP removals), citing the unmaintained proliantutils library and version-locks it imposes on upper-constraints. Modern iLO hardware is covered by the generic redfish driver. "Scream loudly now" if you object.

Releases & Announcements

Gazpacho Debian packages are ready and tempest-validated, per Thomas Goirand (zigo), with late issues in glance-store and os-ken fixed quickly thanks to Abhishek Kekane and Lajos Katona. Backports for Debian Trixie are available via the osbpo.debian.net repositories. The R+0 release countdown also went out as the cycle wrapped.

Community & Events

The metrics dashboard dispute sharpened. Jay Faulkner pushed back hard on LFX Insights as a replacement for contributor metrics: no review data at all, no grouping by logical OpenStack project (only by repository), and he argued the broken state is disrupting upstream and downstream workflows with no sign TC or Foundation treats it as a priority — even asking whether Bitergia could be restored. This is an unresolved, escalating thread.

On the people front: the Oslo team is discussing adding Ghanshyam Maan to core (with Takashi Kajinami supportive but asking that gmann's attention extend across all Oslo projects), and an Outreachy applicant introduced themselves to the Ironic community. PTG prep continued, with the yaook lifecycle-management team joining for the first time. Neutron also moved its weekly and CI meetings one hour earlier, effective immediately.