OpenClaw merged a P1 Gateway availability fix tonight in PR #111533, fix(gateway): avoid macOS startup freeze during worker reconciliation. The bug was narrow but painful: on macOS, Gateway startup could still block HTTP and WebSocket traffic when a worker provider performed HTTPS during startup reconciliation.
For anyone running OpenClaw as a local or team Gateway, startup responsiveness is not cosmetic. Health checks, browser clients, mobile clients, and worker lifecycle probes all depend on the Gateway remaining responsive while it brings the rest of the system online.
What Changed
The earlier system-CA warmup work ran too late. It happened after worker reconciliation, which meant a worker provider could trigger trust initialization while the main startup path was still sensitive to blocking behavior.
PR #111533 moves that CA warmup barrier to post-attach startup before plugin loading and worker-provider reconciliation. The worker now resolves Node's effective default CA set, leaving Node to own CA option precedence instead of duplicating part of Node's option parsing inside OpenClaw.
The release-note version is direct: macOS Gateway startup should no longer block HTTP or WebSocket traffic while trust initialization runs ahead of worker-provider reconciliation.
Why It Matters
OpenClaw increasingly sits in front of multiple clients and worker providers. A stalled Gateway startup can look like a broken install, a dead local server, or a failed reconnect even when the underlying issue is simply a slow trust lookup.
This fix keeps the user-facing control plane alive while the platform does the slower startup work. That is especially important for macOS users, where system trust settings can involve runtime behavior that Linux operators may never notice.
Evidence
The PR reports focused Gateway and heap validation on Blacksmith Testbox with 75 tests passing, plus pnpm check:changed across the selected core guards, typechecks, lint shards, and database/import boundary checks.
The most useful proof is the runtime probe. On macOS with Node v26.5.0 and system CA enabled, worker trust initialization took just over two seconds while the main event loop still completed 1,850 timer ticks. A following main-thread default-CA lookup took less than a millisecond, with the same 122 certificates returned in both contexts.
That demonstrates the intended contract: trust initialization can take real time, but it should not freeze the Gateway event loop.
Operator Takeaway
No configuration change is required. If you run OpenClaw on macOS and have seen startup feel wedged while workers or providers initialize, this is the kind of fix that should make the system feel less fragile.
It also continues a broader pattern in recent OpenClaw work: startup and recovery paths are being treated as first-class reliability surfaces, not afterthoughts.