Customer/Partner Jira Case ID Status Details All Nmstate users RHEL-25732 No Customer case [2024-02-21] The decision to reintroduce the slaves property in RHEL-9.2 was made to mitigate IBM compute nodes upgrade failures from OCP 4.12 to OCP 4.14, where Nmstate configurations were broken due to the removal of `slaves` in favor of `ports`( OCPBUGS-22498 ). However,  as the `slaves` property had been deprecated in RHEL 8 and removed in RHEL-9, the current issue involves the revert of the reintroduction in RHEL-9.4, which is underway in the current sprint. We have also reached out to Nmstate stakeholders to notify them of this situation and prevent similar occurrences in the future. 

Given a system administrator is upgrading their system from RHEL-9.2 (where the "slaves" property is temporarily reintroduced for backward compatibility) to RHEL-9.4, When they apply network configurations involving interface previously relied on the "slaves" property, Then Nmstate must reject configurations explicitly using the "slaves" property with a clear error message indicating that the property is deprecated and suggesting the `port` property to users. Definition of Done:  The implementation meets the acceptance criteria Unit test and integration tests are written and pass The fix is part of a downstream build attached to an errata