Release Notes

September 1, 2026

v0.0.118

NemoClaw v0.0.118 adds headless package boundaries for Hermes lifecycle planning and credential-free external OpenShell gateway health checks. It improves fail-closed sandbox destruction, rebuild, onboarding, Shields, inference, and Hermes recovery. It also broadens Deferred N1x detection and gives N1x managed vLLM a dedicated serving profile.

  • The new nemoclaw/lifecycle package export supports deterministic Hermes 0.19.0 lifecycle planning and read-only agent observation with OpenShell 0.0.106. Callers provide the observation capability; the package does not own transport, authentication, persistence, or mutation. The Blueprint Runner can also check a configured external OpenShell gateway through the pinned SDK without credentials or mutation. Related changes: PR #10703 and PR #10618.
  • OpenClaw sandbox destruction now detects Shields-locked Mcporter configuration before mutation and provides recovery guidance. destroy --force can continue only for retained OpenClaw Mcporter entries, while Hermes and ordinary MCP mutations remain fail-closed. Related change: PR #10483.
  • Rebuild now stops before deleting the original sandbox when any declared state directory or file cannot be preserved, including with --force. When cleanup fails, NemoClaw retains the incomplete snapshot at the reported path. It excludes the snapshot from snapshot list and restore selection. The directory can contain unsanitized credentials. Keep it owner-only. Do not restore, copy, share, or edit it. Repair access to the original sandbox state. Remove the retained directory only after you verify that the original sandbox or a complete snapshot contains every required state item. Confirm that the reported path is absent. Then rerun the operation. A failed nested onboarding result no longer proceeds to restore or report success. Related changes: PR #10686 and PR #10590.
  • Fresh onboarding now ends the OpenShell create handoff after receiving a validated durable sandbox ID, then settles and verifies identity before post-create effects. This prevents affected WSL2 ARM OpenClaw sandboxes from moving from Ready to Error while publication metadata is still settling. Related change: PR #10789.
  • Hermes stopped-sandbox recovery reuses verified lifecycle and inference state. It still rolls back failures and performs final readiness qualification. Hermes dashboards behind a reverse proxy also accept the hostname from a validated HTTPS CHAT_UI_URL for HTTP and WebSocket requests while remaining bound to loopback. Related changes: PR #10641 and PR #10687.
  • Inference status now queries the selected gateway instead of implicitly using the default gateway. Hugging Face model downloads with no output abort after a bounded stall timeout. Managed vLLM accepts a catalog short name, full Hugging Face model ID, or registered served model name as aliases for the same model. Onboarding normalizes known aliases when it reuses an existing managed vLLM endpoint, while pull-request CI verifies pinned Hugging Face references without credentials. Related changes: PR #10698, PR #10352, and PR #10429.
  • Shields status for Hermes now remains read-only instead of repairing mutable state during observation. Related change: PR #10710.
  • DGX Station Express host preparation now ignores NemoClaw and OpenShell agent processes owned by another user for non-root and sudo controllers. It still blocks the controller agent processes and keeps direct-root agent checks, vLLM conflicts, and Docker conflicts host-wide. Related change: PR #10689.
  • Deferred N1x preview detection now accepts NVIDIA display-class GPUs without requiring one PCI device ID and recognizes OEM DGX Spark FastOS identity. N1x managed vLLM uses a dedicated Qwen3.6 35B NVFP4 serving profile with a physically exercised memory, context, concurrency, and batching envelope; N1x remains Deferred pending complete Express end-to-end validation. Related changes: PR #10099, PR #10721, and PR #10625.