Nephio R6 Release Notes

Overview

Nephio R6 is a maintenance release focused on stability, security, and platform improvements. This release includes:

• Platform enhancements: Porch v1.5.6 with critical fixes, security patches, and performance improvements
• Security updates: Golang upgraded to v1.25.6+ across all projects with dependency updates
• O2 IMS integration: New REST Provision API for O-RAN O2 IMS functionality
• Documentation improvements: Enhanced aesthetics, bug fixes, and migration of Porch documentation to its own dedicated site

This release continues to demonstrate Nephio’s core principles of intent-driven automation, configuration-as-data, and distributed actuation for managing cloud-native network functions at scale.

Prerequisites

Refer to the Installation Guide for the prerequisites on supported environments.

Support matrix

The Nephio sandbox demo environment requires hardware with the following specifications:

OS support

• Ubuntu 22.04
• Fedora 38

System Requirements

Kubernetes version support

These installations have been verified on virtual machines (VMs) running on Google Cloud.

Features

Functionalities

• Platform

  • Porch fixes, security patches, and enhancements. See Porch fixes and enhancements for more details.
  • Nephio fixes, security patches, and enhancements.
  • O2 IMS REST Provision API added.

• Documentation

  • Improvements in aesthetics and bug fixes.
  • Migration of the Porch documentation to it’s own project.

• Security

  • Golang version upgrades on all go based projects to >= v1.25.6
  • Dependency upgrades

Limitations

• Intercluster networking is not dynamic. Therefore, as more clusters are deployed, some manual tweaking will be needed for intercluster communications.
• Provisioning of the VLAN interfaces on the nodes is currently performed manually.
• Observability between workload clusters to the management cluster is limited. You may need to connect directly to the workload cluster via kubectl to resolve any deployment issues.
• The web UI features are limited to the viewing and editing of packages, resources in those packages, and their deployment. Additional features will be added in subsequent releases.
• When the capacities of the UPF, SMF, and AMF NFs are changed, the free5GC operator on the workload cluster will instantiate a new POD with correspondingly modified resources (CPU, memory, and so on). During this process, the pod will restart. This is a limitation of free5GC.
• Only Gitea works with automated cluster provisioning to create new repositories and join them to Nephio. To use a different Git provider, you must manually provision the cluster repositories, register them to the Nephio management server, and set up Config Sync on the workload cluster.
• The web UI does not require authentication in the current demo configuration. Testing of the web UI with authentication configured has not yet been done.
• The web UI only shows the resources in the default namespace.
• While many types of Git authentication are supported, testing has only been done with token-based Git authentication in Gitea.

Known issues and workarounds

• Packages may take time to be approved by the auto-approval controller. If they appear to have frozen, it may help to restart the Porch and the Nephio controllers using the following commands:

kubectl -n porch-system rollout restart deploy porch-server
kubectl -n nephio-system rollout restart deploy nephio-controller

• Occasional calls to porchctl rpkg copy may fail with the following message:

  Error: Internal error occurred: error applying patch: conflict: fragment line does not match src line.

  If such a message appears, then retry in a little while, as this error may resolve itself. Restarting Porch may also help.

Appendix

Porch fixes and enhancements

• Porch full changelog