v25.3.11

Bug Fixes

• Fixed shadow link replicating all historical data when start_at_timestamp is set to a timestamp beyond the end of the source partition log. The link now falls back to the last stable offset and replicates only new data. by @nguyen-andrew in #29900
• Fixes a possible cause of offset translator inconsistency arising from incorrect truncation of the log. by @bharathv in #29872
• Repair tiered-storage manifests with misaligned archive offsets during archiver startup. This unblocks retention when such a manifest was present. by @nvartolomei in #29921
• Upgrade libxml2 to v2.15.2 to fix CVE-2026-0990 (Uncontrolled
  Recursion via xmlCatalogXMLResolveURI() in XML catalog processing). by @tyson-redpanda in #29811
• fix dangling reference in many partitions edge case by @joe-redpanda in #29932
• Fix name prefix in Kafka client ID by @bharathv in [#29784]
• Prevent use-after-modification in disk_log_impl::disk_usage() by @WillemKauf in [#29897]
• Fix iobuf hash by @StephanDollberg in [#29915]

Improvements

• Archive garbage collection now deletes segments in bounded batches (controlled by cloud_storage_gc_max_segments_per_run, default 300) instead of attempting to delete the entire backlog in a single housekeeping run. This prevents unbounded object storage delete requests on partitions with large expired archives, ensures each run commits incremental progress, and automatically schedules fast follow-up runs until the backlog is fully drained. by @nvartolomei in #29923
• Remove a copy of a potentially large datastructure when starting a transaction by @rockwotj in #29836
• #29855 Minor improvement to speed up feature activation after major version upgrades. by @pgellert in #29880
• Replace circular buffer with chunked equivalent by @IoannisRP in [#29579]
• Add reset topic state escape hatch by @nvartolomei in [#29759]
• Deterministic shadow link status output by @bharathv in [#29912]

Full Changelog: v25.3.10...v25.3.11

v25.3.10

Bug Fixes

• Fixed buggy race detection logic in archival segment collection that could miss races between collection and compaction. by @oleiman in #29729
• Schema Registry: Fixes a bug in Avro schema compilation where external references were not properly resolved from the schema store, causing compilation failures, compatibility check failures or server-side schema id validation failures for schemas with reference dependencies. For v25.3.x patch versions, the bug fix is only enabled if the new cluster config schema_registry_avro_use_named_references is enabled, while starting v26.1.1 it the new behaviour is always enabled. by @pgellert in #29627

Improvements

• Shadow Linking: allow creating shadow links with TLS settings where the CA/key/cert strings exceed 128KiB. by @pgellert in #29746

Full Changelog: v25.3.9...v25.3.10

v25.3.9

Bug Fixes

• Fixes an issue where kafka clients that don't set a max_wait_ms (such as the schema registry client) would timeout immediately and not return any data. by @rockwotj in #29710

Full Changelog: v25.3.8...v25.3.9

v25.3.8

Bug Fixes

• Fixes duplicate message writes in Iceberg when disk or memory reservation errors occur. by @ballard26 in #29397

Improvements

• #29652 rpk redpanda admin config log-level set: Added --help-loggers flag to display the list of available loggers without setting any log level. by @r-vasquez in #29653
• #29652 rpk redpanda admin config log-level set: now dynamically discovers available loggers from the local Redpanda binary or the Admin API. by @r-vasquez in #29653
• PR #29075 [v25.3.x] admin: update shadow indexing api doc by @nvartolomei
• PR #29520 [v25.3.x] coordinated compaction improvements by @bashtanov
• PR #29541 [v25.3.x] storage: manage priority logs in housekeeping_loop [take 2] by @WillemKauf
• PR #29586 [v25.3.x] bazel: Update protobuf to 33.5 by @michael-redpanda
• PR #29607 [v25.3.x] rptests/util/repeat_check: make it work correctly in wait_until by @bashtanov
  Full Changelog: v25.3.7...v25.3.8

v25.3.7

Bug Fixes

• Fixed admin API service restart to handle pandaproxy and schema_registry on the correct shard. by @pgellert in #29523
• Fixes a bug where truncation does not propagate to sink if source start offset has moved ahead of sink high watermark. by @bharathv in #29446
• firm up start offset update logic by @joe-redpanda in #29467
• PR #29393 [v25.3.x] cloud_io: handle key_not_found when listing bucket objects by @nvartolomei
• PR #29477 [v25.3.x] iobuf: fix operator<=> and operator== for string_view comparisons by @travisdowns
• PR #29497 [v25.3.x] kafka: Clamp consume deadline to 5s by @Lazin

Improvements

• Adds native support for buf's protovalidate to Schema Registry by @michael-redpanda in #29417
• Improve performance of Shadow Link when scaling to thousands of topics but making internal data structures copy on write by @michael-redpanda in #29231
• Upgrade libxml2 to latest minor version by @tyson-redpanda in #29433
• PR #29503 [v25.3.x] bazel: Update OpenSSL to 3.0.19 by @michael-redpanda
• PR #29531 [v25.3.x] cluster_link: improve comment for prefix truncation delay logic by @michael-redpanda
• PR #29537 [v25.3.x] kafka/client: fix race condition in direct_consumer_test by @ballard26

Full Changelog: v25.3.6...v25.3.7

v25.3.6

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where Kafka fetch session responses could omit partitions with changed metadata (high watermark, log start offset, last stable offset) when the fetch retried internally due to min_bytes not being satisfied. by @pgellert in #29349
• Fixed cluster link replication attempting prefix truncation on partitions that do not support it (e.g., cloud topics) by @michael-redpanda in #29296
• Fixed file cleanup issue in datalake::record_multiplexer. by @ballard26 in #29277
• #29299 Fix the partition_response for a produce request to a LogAppendTime topic to accurately reflect the timestamp_type. by @WillemKauf in #29301
• guarantee invalid lso gets converted to a retryable error when relevant by @joe-redpanda in #29307

Improvements

• Improve cluster linking shadow topic prefix truncation error message. by @pgellert in #29303
• Schema Registry: Optimise compatibility checking for json to allow more nested schemas. by @BenPope in #29317
• PR #28757 [CORE-14007] Fix timeout handling in TS by @Lazin
• PR #29294 c/topic_table: use chunked_hash_map for lifecycle markers by @bashtanov
• PR #29330 bazel: Update seastar to latest by @StephanDollberg

Full Changelog: v25.3.5...v25.3.6

v25.2.14

Bug Fixes

• Adds better validation to arrays and strings being read off the wire from kafka clients. by @WillemKauf in #29228
• Fix a cache collision in in-memory spillover manifest cache which could lead to new topic reading data from the old topic with the same name for a short period of time. by @nvartolomei in #29089
• Iceberg: Allow bucket names with dots. Also, reject URIs returned by catalog that look like s3://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/path/to/object. by @nvartolomei in #29095
• Reduces a window in which Redpanda may end up missing data when using the object_storage catalog for Iceberg Topics. Reminder: the object_storage is generally unsafe and should not be used in production. by @andrwng in #28532
• #29297 Fix the partition_response for a produce request to a LogAppendTime topic to accurately reflect the timestamp_type. by @WillemKauf in #29300
• prevents state machine from loading local snapshot with offsets greater than log dirty offset by @mmaslankaprv in #29007

Improvements

• Connection errors now report the resolved address where possible. by @BenPope in #29204
• kafka/client: Improve retry to logic to properly rotate all provided seed servers. by @BenPope in #29205
• PR #28312 [CORE-14442] rm_stm: do not reinsert producer to active tx producers list if present by @mmaslankaprv
• PR #29292 c/topic_table: use chunked_hash_map for lifecycle markers by @bashtanov

Full Changelog: v25.2.13...v25.2.14

v25.3.5

Features

• Cluster health report now includes node IDs of nodes that exceed the disk usage reporting thresholds. by @bharathv in #29141
• Iceberg: Support customizing Iceberg catalog namespace (defaults to redpanda) at cluster level. by @nvartolomei in #29169
• Snapshot id correlated with table update transaction is now available in Datalake REST API by @mmaslankaprv in #29256
• rpk shadow config generate: now supports --print-template along with --for-cloud by @r-vasquez in #29126
• rpk: WCR supports --cluster-uuid-override by @daisukebe in #29185
• rpk: rpk can now be used to create Redpanda roles in Redpanda Cloud using the rpk security role command. by @r-vasquez in #29211

Bug Fixes

• Adds better validation to arrays and strings being read off the wire from kafka clients. by @WillemKauf in #29227
• PR #29243 Fix bug in iobuf::operator<=> by @ballard26
• PR #29273 bytes: ensure iobuf::operator<=>(...) is an unsigned byte-wise comparison by @ballard26
• PR #28682 health_monitor: Fix oversized alloc in MTT scenarios by @StephanDollberg
• PR #29147 CORE-14619 rpk: fix version check logic for semver by @pgellert

Improvements

• Connection errors now report the resolved address where possible. by @BenPope in #29202
• rpk shadow create [cloud]: now rpk validates if the secret exists in the Shadow cluster before sending a request to create by @r-vasquez in #29129
• rpk shadow describe now supports the --format json/yaml flag. by @r-vasquez in #29130
• PR #29275 Improve descriptions for OpenAPI (backport) by @kbatuigas

Full Changelog: v25.3.4...v25.3.5

v25.3.4

Features

• Enable compaction of transactional control batches per delete.retention.ms. This feature cannot be enabled at the same time as any tiered storage topic properties (i.e this feature is only accessible for local topics). by @bashtanov in #29109

Bug Fixes

• Fix a cache collision in in-memory spillover manifest cache which could lead to new topic reading data from the old topic for a short period of time. by @nvartolomei in #29086
• Iceberg: Allow bucket names with dots. Also, reject URIs returned by catalog that look like s3://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/path/to/object. by @nvartolomei in #29096

Full Changelog: v25.3.3...v25.3.4

v25.3.3

Bug Fixes

• Fixes incorrect reporting of partition movement progress in decommission/reconfiguration status output. by @bharathv in #29055
• Prevent a slew of races between operations in the storage layer that could lead to attempting to append to a closed segment or a failed assert by @WillemKauf in #28545
• Updated C-Ares to 1.34.6 to address CVE-2025-62408 by @michael-redpanda in #29052
• Variety of fixes to reduce noise in log concerning internal kafka client authentication and authorization by @michael-redpanda in #28927
• prevents state machine from loading local snapshot with offsets greater than log dirty offset by @mmaslankaprv in #29008

Improvements

• Improve timeout logic for failover link to not timeout when processing thousands of shadow topics by @michael-redpanda in #28997
• Increase frequency of topic reconciliation loop to reduce time it takes to failover topics by @michael-redpanda in #28997
• Reduce log noise by @michael-redpanda in #28997
• rpk shadow now has visual feedback on long-running operations. by @r-vasquez in #29078
• reduce test failures on data_migrations_api_test by @joe-redpanda in #28829
• rpk shadow describe now shows Schema Registry sync mode. by @r-vasquez in #29035
• rpk: consume warns when requested end offset is lower than available start offset by @daisukebe in #29049
• PR #29030 [v25.3.x] Fetch read concurrency fix by @ballard26
• PR #29042 [v25.3.x] [CORE-15015] security & kafka: audit log deflaking by @WillemKauf

Full Changelog: v25.3.2...v25.3.3