Arvados Logo

Arvados 3.2.1 Release Notes

March 2, 2026

The Arvados team is pleased to announce the release of Arvados 3.2.1. This release has some interface improvements to refine the work done in 3.2.0; scale improvements for large clusters; and bug fixes throughout, especially to make installation more reliable. We recommend that existing installations of 3.2.0 or earlier upgrade to 3.2.1. See Upgrading Arvados for instructions.

User Interface

Projects, collections, and workflows can all have descriptions. A small preview of the description has been moved under the title, along with easy access to the full description for longer text. With this change, collection pages start with the Files tab open and workflow pages start with the Runs tab open. This should speed up navigation when you’re looking at familiar pages while keeping the description accessible when you’re looking at something new. #23390

A screenshot of a WGS workflow in Arvados Workbench. A couple of sentences of description appear under the Title, followed by a “Read Full Description” link. The Runs tab is open to show queued and completed runs of the workflow.

When you start a workflow with “New→Run Workflow,” Workbench correctly respects your selected “Project where the workflow will run.” #23344

File listings use all available space. #23331

Administrator Tools

arvados-server provides several subcommands to query and manage the cloud dispatcher. Refer to the admin documentation for full details. This is a friendly interface to the management API that has existed for a while. #20471

The administrator API to inspect active requests includes the value of the X-Forwarded-For header. #23385

The cluster activity workflow registers the cost spreadsheet as an output. #23398

The cluster activity workflow stores Prometheus credentials in a file to pass CWL validation.

Fixed a crash when running the cluster activity report with a Prometheus username+password.

Fixed an erroneous cluster diagnostics error when compute nodes are outside the internal network but run a local keepstore service. #23317

crunch-run --list does not wait to read from standard input by default. #22401

Arvados Backend

Improved performance when a container record is reused by many (tens of thousands) of container requests. #23382

The Crunch cloud dispatcher shuts down instances with instance types that do not appear in the cluster configuration (e.g., because that type was recently removed by an administrator). #22971

Optimized keep-balance to use less RAM. We have seen 3.2.1 use less than half as much RAM in real large clusters. #23235

Fixed a race condition that could cause WebDAV to refuse certain sets of concurrent collection updates with a 409 Conflict response. #22824

Deployment

We publish packages and support installation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux 10. #23015

The Packer templates to build compute nodes wait for cloud-init to finish before starting Ansible. #23290

The compute node builder pins more NVIDIA CUDA packages to account for recent releases. #23458

The Salt installer no longer configures the Phusion Passenger package repository. Arvados stopped requiring this in the 3.1.0 release. #23406

The Ansible installer configures Passenger scaling options automatically based on your cluster configuration. #23237

The Ansible installer configures nginx correctly when the cluster is configured with a single port for container web services. #23088

The Ansible installer sets up more services on a cluster. It’s still not ready to replace the Salt installer, but getting closer:

Dependencies

The Rails API server declares its dependencies in a more modern way to address an installation bug on RHEL 8 and prevent future issues. #23000, #23294, #23307

Updated dependencies for all Arvados components to get the latest security fixes:

All Arvados components now use Docker API version 1.48 to get ready for Docker 29. #23304

The cluster activity report requires specific versions of its dependencies to continue working as new versions are released. #23450

Arvados Development

The Ansible development playbook can build specific versions of Python and Ruby from source. By default, it installs the oldest versions supported by Arvados to help developers avoid using too-new features in their work. #23310

The Arvados test suite runs and passes on Debian 13 (as long as you use an older version of Python supported by arvados-cwl-runner). #23374

All Ansible playbooks now support Debian 13. #23373

Developers no longer need to remove their Workbench config.json to run tests. #23296

Fixed a bug where the crunchrun tests would fail if you ran them by themselves. #23318

Updated a Crunch Singularity test to use ARVADOS_TEST_PRIVESC instead of relying on a privileged executable. #23225

Coming Up…

The 3.2.1 release includes development on larger components that will eventually replace some older ones. This work isn’t visible to users yet, but the code is there.

The Go FUSE driver supports different mount layout options used by Crunch. It reports all the same usage statistics as the Python driver. #23246, #23245, #23284, #23313

We are developing a new version of the arv command as part of the Python SDK. This will remove any need to install Ruby on client systems. #23293