openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Feature]: Graceful config reload — don't abort active agent sessions [1 participants]

Problem

When an agent dynamically creates a new Discord channel (e.g., by updating the OpenClaw config to add a channel entry), the config change triggers a hot-reload (SIGUSR1 in hybrid mode). This aborts the agent's own active session, breaking any multi-step workflow that was in progress.

Real-world scenario

A dispatcher agent (luna-agent) needs to:

1. Create a new Discord channel for a task
2. Update OpenClaw config to register the new channel
3. Dispatch a task to leader-agent in the new channel

Step 2 triggers a reload → luna-agent's session is killed → Step 3 never executes. The entire multi-agent dispatch flow is broken.

Proposed Solution

Option A: Turn-level deferral — Don't restart until the current agent turn completes. The existing deferralTimeoutMs (default 5min) helps but is a wall-clock timeout, not turn-aware.

Option B: Dynamic channel registration — Allow adding new channels at runtime without a config file change (and thus without triggering a reload). Something like a POST /api/channels endpoint or a tool that registers channels dynamically.

Option C: Orphan recovery for main sessions — The existing subagent-orphan-recovery resumes aborted subagent sessions after restart. Extend this to main session flows (resume from where the agent was interrupted).

Context

• OpenClaw supports 4 reload modes: off, restart, hot, hybrid (default)
• GatewayReloadConfig.deferralTimeoutMs exists but doesn't guarantee turn completion
• subagent-orphan-recovery.ts handles subagent resume but not main sessions
• This is critical for multi-agent architectures where one agent orchestrates others across Discord channels

Environment

• OpenClaw: latest (running from source)
• Platform: Discord (multi-bot, multi-channel setup)
• Multiple OpenClaw agent instances, each mapped to a Discord bot