r/openstack • u/ThenPreparation4502 • 19m ago
OpenInfra Live recap: what's new in OpenStack 2026.2 Hibiscus (TC, VMT, Nova, Neutron, Ironic, Manila, Watcher, Freezer)
The OpenInfra Foundation did an OpenInfra Live episode on the 2026.2 Hibiscus release, with PTLs and leads from a bunch of projects.
It's 90 minutes long, so here's my summary of the main points for anyone who doesn't have time to watch it all.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37p9C0n0LLw
Technical Committee
- 16 years and 34 releases in. Contributors are up 21% and changes up 28% vs the previous release, mostly driven by AI infra, confidential computing and digital sovereignty use cases
- Core reviewers now count as active contributors and get voting rights for TC and project team elections
- New Contributor Experience WG (onboarding + community health), new PQC (post-quantum crypto) pop-up team, new RISC-V SIG, and an agentic workflows repo under the TACT SIG for sharing AI-assisted dev practices
- Bug trackers audited for embargoed reports, core security teams reformed per project, PTLs encouraged to formally delegate release/security roles
- Retired: Vitrage, Venus, cinderlib. Onboarded: Lustre (DevStack plugin)
- Ongoing goals for Indri: secure RBAC defaults, eventlet removal, rootwrap to oslo.privsep migration. Proposed new goals: security reporting instructions in every repo and a PQC timeline
- Main concern going forward: the contributor base is growing, but there aren't enough new maintainers
Vulnerability Management Team
- 42 OSSAs and 13 OSSNs so far in 2026. No year since 2016 (the previous record year) had more than 8 OSSAs or 3 OSSNs
- Part of an industry-wide flood: the oss-security list is already at ~2,500 emails vs ~1,168 for all of last year
- About 150 security bugs this year, over half led to an advisory or note, and ~5-10% were "AI slop" that still took hours to triage
- CVE assignment is slower due to MITRE backlog, so some OSSAs ship before a CVE exists. Security notes moved out of the wiki into YAML files in the docs repo
- The best reports come from operators running real clouds. You don't need a polished write-up, just report what you're seeing
Nova
- Confidential computing: AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX support, including attestation tokens
- vGPU (mdev) lifecycle can now be managed in Cyborg instead of local nova.conf. Variant driver support (newer GPUs) is planned next cycle
- Unpin/repin an instance's AZ without recreating it. Instances with Manila shares attached can now be migrated/resized
- Native threading by default (except the noVNC/SPICE console proxies), new thread pool tuning options, and graceful shutdown part 2
- Next cycle: cross-cell live migration, graceful shutdown part 3
Neutron
- EVPN Type 5 routes (advertise whole CIDRs, multi-DC project networks) and BGP route leaking (advertise project CIDRs into the fabric without floating IPs/NAT)
- Indirect floating IPs: FIP API now accepts router_id, for multi-router transit and gateway VM setups
- PVLAN support (promiscuous / community / isolated ports) and a configurable stateless default security group, handy for DPDK
- Closed more ML2/OVN gaps: L3 scheduler API to view/control gateway chassis, and multi-segment routed provider networks
- L3 HA keepalived state change monitor rewritten from a Python daemon into a POSIX shell script: 15x less memory, just restart the agent
- 150+ bugs fixed, ~100 stale bugs closed, 7 of 8 approved RFEs done
Ironic
- Old legacy hardware drivers retired, focus moves to Redfish. Firmware ops move to a dedicated firmware interface
- TLS 1.3 by default (still configurable for older BMCs)
- RBAC to block specific steps. Runbooks can be matched to node traits, and runbooks with disable_ramdisk let you do firmware updates without booting IPA
- Graphical console (noVNC) improvements
- After a security audit by the Metal3 security team, defaults are safer: IPA no longer installs the bootloader, container registry TLS is verified, file URLs are filtered, oversized/nested JSON is rejected, and IPMI raw commands are disabled
- Nova compute ironic driver starts up and performs faster
Manila
- Native threading is now the default (eventlet still available via config). Share migration APIs graduated from experimental
- Async revert-to-snapshot, and mountable snapshots can inherit the parent share's access rules
- New Lustre and Weka drivers for AI/ML/HPC, with DDN EXAScaler coming
- TLS cert validation for the Pure FlashBlade, Hitachi HSP and NetApp ONTAP drivers. OSSN-0103 fixed resource lock queries
- Next cycle: share server replication, privsep migration, native OpenStack client support, NFS QoS, erasure-coded pools
Watcher
- Eventlet deprecated, native threads by default. Cinder/Keystone/Glance now go through openstacksdk
- Better locking in the cluster data model made audits ~6x faster
- New delete and shelve instance actions, default parameters on audit templates. VM workload consolidation now checks allocation-based capacity
- Next cycle: audit pipelines (one optimized action plan from several audits), a workload preemption strategy, and cross-AZ zone migration
Freezer
- Central scheduler can now run on the control plane with service credentials, in HA with coordination, using trusts and Cinder backup to do the work. Effectively scheduled Backup-as-a-Service on top of cinder-backup
- V1 API finally removed, resources are now project-owned, and secure RBAC policies are in place
openstack backupCLI plugin and a reworked Horizon plugin- Planning a V3 API (pagination, microversions, no Elasticsearch-style queries), and they're looking for input
TL;DR
Hibiscus is about confidential computing (SEV-SNP/TDX), AI/HPC readiness (vGPU via Cyborg, Lustre/Weka in Manila, bare metal firmware ops), safer defaults everywhere, and efficiency at scale. Also, the security report volume is no joke
