Epic Goal

Support upstream feature "New VolumeManager Reconstruction" in OCP as fully supported.

Summary:  After kubelet is restarted, it looses track of all volume it mounted for running Pods. It tries to restore this state from the API server, where kubelet can find Pods that should be running, and from the host's OS, where it can find actually mounted volumes. We know this process is imperfect. This feature tries to rework the process. While the work is technically a bugfix, it changes large parts of kubelet, and we'd like to have it behind a feature gate to provide users a way to get to the old implementations in case of problems.

The feature is GA in Kubernetes 1.30 and the code is the same as in Kubernetes 1.29  / OCP 4.16.

Why is this important?

• It's prerequiste for STOR-1798.
• The feature gate is enabled by default and cannot be disabled without rendering the cluster un-upgradeable. Which is crazy.
• See OCPSTRAT-1147 for details.

Upstream links

• Enhancement issue: [1710]
• KEP: https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/pull/3172

Acceptance Criteria

• CI - MUST be running successfully with tests automated
• Release Technical Enablement - Provide necessary release enablement details and documents.
• ...

Dependencies (internal and external)

1. RWOP GA is dependent on this.

Done Checklist

• CI - CI is running, tests are automated and merged.
• Release Enablement <link to Feature Enablement Presentation>
• DEV - Upstream code and tests merged: <link to meaningful PR or GitHub Issue>
• DEV - Upstream documentation merged: <link to meaningful PR or GitHub Issue>
• DEV - Downstream build attached to advisory: <link to errata>
• QE - Test plans in Polarion: <link or reference to Polarion>
• QE - Automated tests merged: <link or reference to automated tests>
• DOC - Downstream documentation merged: <link to meaningful PR>