Hi Stackers,

In 2022, during the Zed cycle, the Neutron team took a step at marking
some items as experimental. One of those was the Linuxbridge driver. The
reason was due to it being unmaintained for a number of cycles, and no
one was able to take on its ownership. The implication of this decision
was that it was consider deprecated, even if not given an official
warning message.

In doing this, all gate jobs were moved into the experimental queue,
feature-parity with other drivers was deemed unnecessary, and bug fixing
was considered best-effort. Since then, both major distros have stopped
supporting new deployments using Linuxbridge, and have been mainly
focused on OVN.

So what does this mean? We (the neutron cores) have come to the
conclusion that it is time to take the next step and remove the code
from the tree [1]. After 5 cycles of being considered experimental
without any investment it just makes sense. We plan on doing this in the
current Epoxy cycle.

We realize that there are still deployments using Linuxbridge, and
hopefully they have been looking at migration strategies since we
originally marked the code experimental. This email is another push to
the user community to start looking at this, especially if you are
planning any new deployments. There has been at least one migration
guide written at [2] (thanks Jim!), and at this point I would encourage
those still using Linuxbridge to look at it and start asking any
questions they have so we have the chance to make it better and can make
that process easier.

Thanks for reading,

-Brian, Neutron PTL

[0] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/neutron/+/845181
[1] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/neutron/+/927216
[2] https://www.jimmdenton.com/migrating-lxb-to-ovn/