[Networkmanager] "device is strictly unmanaged"

Tue May 16 07:19:15 UTC 2023

Good morning,

thanks for your quick response and for the pointer to udev; I'll try to dig in that area...

What I already found is this: on a system where things work fine I see this in the NM log:

May 16 07:38:47 smaug NetworkManager[17979]: <debug> [1684215527.6817] platform-linux: UDEV event: action 'add' subsys 'net' device 'enp0s20f0u6u3u4' (8); seqnum=3479
May 16 07:38:47 smaug NetworkManager[17979]: <trace> [1684215527.6817] platform-linux: udev-add[enp0s20f0u6u3u4,8]: device added

This reference to the UDEV add action is missing on the system where it doesn't work. However, what I _can_ see on the not-working system is that udev events are generated when I plug the USB dongle:

KERNEL[1049.046495] add      /bus/usb/drivers/r8152 (drivers)
KERNEL[1049.047226] add      /module/r8152 (module)
KERNEL[1049.047321] remove   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:16.0/0000:0b:00.0/usb4/4-1/4-1:2.0 (usb)
KERNEL[1049.047394] remove   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:16.0/0000:0b:00.0/usb4/4-1/4-1:2.1 (usb)
KERNEL[1049.049475] add      /module/usbnet (module)
KERNEL[1049.056982] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:16.0/0000:0b:00.0/usb4/4-1/4-1:1.0 (usb)
KERNEL[1049.177024] add      /bus/usb/drivers/cdc_ether (drivers)
KERNEL[1049.177715] add      /module/cdc_ether (module)
KERNEL[1049.179112] add      /bus/usb/drivers/r8153_ecm (drivers)
KERNEL[1049.179569] add      /module/r8153_ecm (module)
KERNEL[1049.405946] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:16.0/0000:0b:00.0/usb4/4-1/4-1:1.0/net/eth1 (net)
KERNEL[1049.405956] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:16.0/0000:0b:00.0/usb4/4-1/4-1:1.0/net/eth1/queues/rx-0 (queues)
KERNEL[1049.405960] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:16.0/0000:0b:00.0/usb4/4-1/4-1:1.0/net/eth1/queues/tx-0 (queues)
KERNEL[1049.406102] bind     /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:16.0/0000:0b:00.0/usb4/4-1/4-1:1.0 (usb)

So for some reason these UDEV events are not propagated to NetworkManager...
I'll try to figure out why.

Thanks and best regards,
Christian

Am 15.05.23 um 15:12 schrieb Thomas Haller:
> On Mon, 2023-05-15 at 14:24 +0200, Christian Schaubschläger wrote:
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I'm having a strange issue with an USB ethernet device (Realtek
>> r8152) and NetworkManager (1.42.6, I've also tried older versions
>> with the same result). I'm not experiencing this on a particular
>> Linux distribution, but rather on a self-tailored Linux (based on
>> Linux from Scratch), so it's probably a configuration issue, but
>> unfortunately I'm really out of ideas what's wrong here.
>>
>> So the thing is this: when I plug the mentioned USB dongle when the
>> system is up and running, I cannot use it with NetworkManager,
>> because eventually I always get the error
>>
>> "Failed to activate 'eth1': Connection 'eth1' is not available on
>> device eth1 because device is strictly unmanaged"
>>
>> I've googled this error a lot but couldn't find anything that makes
>> things work for me. One interesting thing is, that when I boot the
>> system with the USB dongle connected, everything works as expected.
>> Also, when I boot the system with the dongle disconnected, then plug
>> it, then restart the NM daemon, it works fine, too.
>>
>> I've attached the NetworkManager's logs from a representative
>> session, where first the NM daemon starts, then I connect the dongle
>> (eth1), and I then issue a "nmcli d connect eth1" command.
>> (Note: issuing "nmcli d set eth1 managed yes" prior to connecting
>> doesn't help...)
>>
>> Note2: on Ubuntu 22.04 everything works as expected...
>>
>> Maybe somebody has an idea about what's going wrong here?
>> Thanks and best regards,
>> Christian
>
> Hi,
>
>
>   <debug> [1684158669.6262] platform: (eth1) signal: link   added: 6: eth1 <DOWN;broadcast,multicast> mtu 1500 arp 1 ethernet? not-init addrgenmode
>
> "not-init" means that the interface was not announced in udev.
> NetworkManager expects a signal from udev that the device is usable,
> which never comes.
>
> You certainly would expect a message like that, were it says "init".
>
>
> The most common reason is that you run inside a container, where /sys
> is not mounted as read-only. Udev usually does not run inside a
> container, and that is communicated by mounting /sys as read-only. See
> https://systemd.io/CONTAINER_INTERFACE/
> Note that lxc runs with /sys mounted as writeable, which notably
> confuses NetworkManager and can cause similar problems.
>
> Since you don't run a "normal" linux and not a common container
> runtime, I would suspect that udev is not properly configured.
>
>
> Thomas
>
>