notification failure on serialization item with '\xff' value

2015-02-03 13:44:09.475 3913 ERROR oslo_messaging.notify.notifier [-] Problem ''utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte' attempting to send to notification system. Payload={'if_not_exist': False, 'table_name': u'tempesttest355887112', 'attribute_map': {u'message': {'_data': {'encoded_value': None, 'attr_type': {'_data': {'type': u'B'}, '_hash': None}, 'decoded_value': '\xff'}, '_hash': None}}, 'return_values': {'_data': {'type': 'NONE'}, '_hash': None}, 'expected_condition_map': {}}
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/oslo_messaging/notify/notifier.py", line 177, in do_notify
    ext.obj.notify(ctxt, msg, priority, retry or self.retry)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/oslo_messaging/notify/_impl_log.py", line 41, in notify
    method(jsonutils.dumps(message))
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/oslo_serialization/jsonutils.py", line 186, in dumps
    return json.dumps(obj, default=default, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 250, in dumps
    sort_keys=sort_keys, **kw).encode(obj)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 207, in encode
    chunks = self.iterencode(o, _one_shot=True)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 270, in iterencode
    return _iterencode(o, 0)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte