2023.1 Series Release Notes

21.4.0-5

Bug Fixes

  • Fixes an issue where an agent token could be inadvertently orphaned if a node is already in the target power state when we attempt to turn the node off.

  • No longer re-calculates checksums for images that are already raw. Previously, it would cause significant delays in deploying raw images.

  • Fixes an issue where an agent token was being orphaned if a baremetal node timed out during cleaning operations, leading to issues where the node would not be able to establish a new token with Ironic upon future in some cases. We now always wipe the token in this case.

21.4.0

Prelude

The Ironic team hereby announces the release of OpenStack 2023.1 (Ironic 23.4.0). This repesents the completion of a six month development cycle, which primarily focused on internal and scaling improvements. Those improvements included revamping the database layer to improve performance and ensure compatability with new versions of SQLAlchemy, enhancing the ironic-conductor service to export application metrics to prometheus via the ironic-prometheus-exporter, and the addition of a new API concept of node sharding to help with scaling of services that make frequent API calls to Ironic. The new Ironic release also comes with a slew of bugfixes for Ironic services and hardware drivers. We sincerely hope you enjoy it!

New Features

  • Adds support for the service role, which is intended for service to service communication, such as for those where ironic-inspector, nova-compute, or networking-baremetal needs to communicate with Ironic’s API.

  • Adds the ability for Ironic to send conductor process metrics for monitoring. This requires the use of a new [metrics]backend option value of collector. This data was previously only available through the use of statsd. This requires ironic-lib version 5.4.0 or newer. This capability can be disabled using the [sensor_data]enable_for_conductor option if set to False.

  • Adds a [sensor_data]enable_for_nodes configuration option to allow operators to disable sending node metric data via the message bus notifier.

  • Adds a new gauge metric ConductorManager.PowerSyncNodesCount which tracks the nodes considered for power state synchrnozation.

  • Adds a new gauge metric ConductorManager.PowerSyncRecoveryNodeCount which represents the number of nodes which are being evaluated for power state recovery checking.

  • Adds a new gauge metric ConductorManager.SyncLocalStateNodeCount which represents the number of nodes being tracked locally by the conductor.

  • There are now configurable random wait times for fake drivers in a new ironic.conf [fake] section. Each supported driver having one configuration option controlling the delay. These delays are applied to operations which typically block in other drivers. This allows more realistic scenarios to be arranged for performance and functional testing of ironic itself.

  • Adds support for setting a shard key on a node, and filtering node or port lists by shard. This shard key is not used for any purpose internally in Ironic, but instead is intended to allow API clients to filter for a subset of nodes or ports. Being able to fetch only a subset of nodes or ports is useful for parallelizing any operational task that needs to be performed across all nodes or ports.

  • Adds support for querying for nodes which are sharded or unsharded. This is useful for allowing operators to find nodes which have not been assigned a shard key.

  • Adds support for querying for a list of shards via /v1/shards. This endpoint will return a list of currently assigned shard keys as well as the count of nodes which has those keys assigned. Using this API endpoint, operators can see a high level listing of how their nodes are sharded.

Known Issues

  • Sensor data notifications to the message bus, such as using the [metrics]backend configuration option of collector on a dedicated API service process or instance, is not presently supported. This functionality requires a periodic task to trigger the transmission of metrics messages to the message bus notifier.

Upgrade Notes

  • Ironic now has support for the service role, which is available in the system scope as well as the project scope. This functionality is for service to service communication, if desired. Effective access rights are similar to the manager or the owner scoped admin privileges.

  • Two statsd metrics names have been modified to provide structural clarity and consistency for consumers of statistics metrics. Consumers of metrics statistics may need to update their dashboards as the post_clean_step_hook metric is now named AgentBase.post_clean_step_hook, and the post_deploy_step_hook is now named AgentBase.post_deploy_step_hook.

Deprecation Notes

  • The setting values starting with send_sensor in the [conductor] configuration group have been deprecated and moved to a [sensor_data] configuration group. The names have been updated to shorter, operator friendly names..

Bug Fixes

  • When aborting cleaning, the last_error field is no longer initially empty. It is now populated on the state transition to clean failed.

  • When cleaning or deployment fails, the last_error field is no longer temporary set to None while the power off action is running.

  • Fixes an issue that when a node has console enabled but pid file missing, the console could not be disabled as well as be restarted, which makes the console feature unusable.

  • Fixes issues that auto-allocated console port could conflict on the same host under certain circumstances related to conductor takeover.

    For more information, see story 2010489.

  • Fixes a database API internal check to update the inspection_finished_at field upon the completion of inspection.

  • Fixes an issue in the online upgrade logic where database models for Node Traits and BIOS Settings resulted in an error when performing the online data migration. This was because these tables were originally created as extensions of the Nodes database table, and the schema of the database was slightly different enough to result in an error if there was data to migrate in these tables upon upgrade, which would have occured if an early BIOS Setting adopter had data in the database prior to upgrading to the Yoga release of Ironic.

    The online upgrade parameter now subsitutes an alternate primary key name name when applicable.

  • When a conductor service is stopped it will now continue to respond to RPC requests until [DEFAULT]hash_ring_reset_interval has elapsed, allowing a hash ring reset to complete on the cluster after conductor is unregistered. This will improve the reliability of the cluster when scaling down or rolling out updates.

    This delay only occurs when there is more than one online conductor, to allow fast restarts on single-node ironic installs (bifrost, metal3).

Other Notes

  • The default logging level for the oslo_concurrencty.lockutils module logging has been changed to WARNING. By default, the debug logging was resulting in lots of noise. Operators wishing to view debug logging for this module can tuilize the [DEFAULT]default_log_levels configuration option.

21.3.0

New Features

  • Adds API version 1.81 which enables fetching node inventory which might have been stored during introspection

  • Adds verify step and node vendor passthru method to deal with a firmware incompatibility issue with iRMC versions S6 2.00 and later in which HTTP connection to REST API is not supported and HTTPS connections to REST API is required.

    Verify step checks connection to iRMC REST API and if connection succeeds, it fetches version of iRMC firmware and store it in driver_internal_info/irmc_fw_version. Ironic operators use node vendor passthru method to fetch & update iRMC firmware version cached in driver_internal_info/irmc_fw_version.

Upgrade Notes

  • Since iRMC versions S6 2.00 and later, iRMC firmware doesn’t support HTTP connection to REST API. Operators need to set [irmc] port in ironic.conf or driver_info/irmc_port to 443.

  • When Ironic operator uses irmc driver against Fujitsu server which runs iRMC version S6 2.00 or later, operator may need to set Redfish parameters in driver_info so this fix can operate properly or operator should enable IPMI over LAN through BMC settings, if possible.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixes an issue where if selinux is enabled and enforcing, and the published image is a hardlink, the source selinux context is preserved, causing access denied when retrieving the image using hardlink URL.

  • Fixes the default value for the [DEFAULT]grub_config_path variable to be the default path for UEFI bootloader configurations, where as the default was previously the BIOS grub2 configuration path.

  • Fixes a firmware incompatibility issue with iRMC versions S6 2.00 and later now doesn’t support IPMI over LAN by default. To deal with this problem, irmc driver first tries IPMI operation then, if IPMI operation fails, it tries Redfish API of Fujitsu server. The operator must set Redfish parameters in the driver_info if iRMC disable or doesn’t support IPMI over LAN.

  • Fixes 'NoneType' object is not iterable in conductor logs for redfish and idrac-redfish RAID clean and deploy steps. The message should no longer appear. For affected nodes re-create the node or delete raid_configs entry from driver_internal_info field.

21.2.0

Upgrade Notes

  • Adds an upgrade status check for the Allocation table engine and character set encoding on MySQL. This is a result of a missing encoding definition on the table schema when originally created. This issue will be remedied, in part, in a later version of Ironic, but the upgrade status check will provide advance operator visibility.

  • This upgrade updates the default character set to utilized in the database tables when using MySQL/MariaDB. Previously, the default for Ironic was UTF8, however we now explicitly set UTF8MB3 which is short for “3 byte UTF8” encoding. The exception to this is the allocations table, which would just rely upon the database default. This was done as Ironic’s database schema is incompatible with MySQL/MariaDB’s UTF8MB4, or “4 byte UTF8” character encoding and storage constraints.

  • Upgrading will change the default chracter encoding of all tables. For most tables, this should be an effective noop, but may result in transitory table locks. For the allocations table, it will need to be re-written, during which the database engine will have locked the table from being used. Operators are advised to perform test upgrades and set expectation and upgrade plans accordingly.

  • Adds sha256, sha384 and sha512 as supported SNMPv3 authentication protocols to iRMC driver.

  • Operators who are upgrading should be aware that a bug was discovered with the automatic selection of boot_interface for users of the irmc hardware types. This was an inconsistency, resulting in irmc-pxe being selected instead of ipxe if these boot interfaces were enabled. Depending on the local configuration, this may, or may not have happened and will remain static on preexisting baremetal nodes. Some users may have been relying upon this incorrect behavior by having mis-alligned defaults by trying to use the irmc-pxe interface for ipxe. Users wishing to continue this usage as it was previously will need to explicitly set a boot_interface value to either pxe or irmc-pxe, depending on the local configuration. Most operators have leveraged the default examples, and thus did not explicitly encounter this condition. Operators explicitly wishing to use pxe boot interfaces with the ipxe templates and defaults set to override the defaults for ironic.conf will need to either continue to leverage default override configurations in their ironic.conf file.

  • Ironic has started the process of upgrading the code base to support SQLAlchemy 2.0 in anticipation of it’s release. This results in the minimum version of SQLAlchemy becoming 1.4.0 as it contains migration features for the move to SQLAlchemy 2.0.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixes an missing MySQL/MariaDB character set configuration and default table type encoding for the allocations database table. Previously, If Ironic’s database was attempted to be populated on a machine which was using 4 byte character encoding, such as MySQL/MariaDB on Debian based systems, then the database schema creation would fail.

  • Fixes an issue where unexpected exceptions coming from the process to start cleaning would not trigger the cleaning_error_handler which performs the needful internal resets to permit cleaning to be retried again in the future. Now any error which is encountered during the launch of cleaning will trigger the error handler.

  • Fixes the URL based anaconda deployment for parsing the given image_source url.

  • Fixes URL based anaconda deploy to work in pxe boot. It also enables grub based pxe anaconda deploy which is required for ilo hardware type.

  • Modify iRMC driver to use ironic.conf [deploy] default_boot_mode to determine default boot_mode.

  • Fixes the default boot interface order for the irmc hardware type where previously it would prefer irmc-pxe over ipxe. This created inconsistencies for operators using multiple hardware types, where both interfaces were enabled in the deployment.