OpenClaw 2026.10.4 is a stability patch for 2026.10.3. The changelog is explicit - no new features, no configuration changes - and 83 commits of repair behind it.
What changed for you
The Gateway stops restarting itself across a sleep. Close the laptop, come back, and the Gateway used to decide its ownership heartbeat had gone stale and restart itself. A sleep is enough to trigger it. So is a system clock jump. Ownership state is now recovered after both instead of being declared lost, and openclaw gateway restart works from a verified external macOS terminal.
Shutdown no longer hangs. A stalled transcript worker or in-flight session lifecycle event could hold a restart open indefinitely. Both waits are now bounded.
Manual /compact settles the run first. It used to abort the active run and drop the pending request. Now it waits for the run to settle before compacting.
Two path and redirect traps close. /tmp and /private/tmp are the same directory on macOS, and treating the two spellings as different strings restarted channels whenever both met. Loopback OAuth redirect URIs registered without a port now complete login instead of stalling.
The quieter fixes worth knowing
Long replies that quote tool-call XML no longer re-parse Markdown on every token, so a reply that reproduces a tool transcript stays cheap to stream. Group DM authors are never treated as the owner, which closes an owner-impersonation path. Headless browser pages keep accepting clicks while a site waits for a passkey. Reasoning-model tool turns on the OpenAI Completions route no longer 400. Enabled standalone plugin files start with the Gateway, and worker heap limits hold even when the managed service sets a process-wide heap flag.
Nothing here needs a migration. It is the release to take if 2026.10.3 has been restarting your Gateway on a machine that sleeps.