[systemd-devel] Networkd fails to activate the device on boot

[Thomas Bächler]

Am 18.08.2014 um 12:41 schrieb Tom Gundersen:
>> 1) The enp3s0 interface does not activate on boot. I need to restart
>> networkd manually to make it work.
> 
> Hm, that is decidedly uncool. It seems we are not aware of the link.
> Could you try with Environment=SYSTEMD_LOG_LEVEL=debug in your service
> file to get some more info (of course that may hide the bug)? Is this
> reproducible with current git (I don't know of any fix to this, but
> you never know).

I don't know if I'll get to it today, but I'll try to do it ASAP. I did
not try latest git, and I'd like to avoid it on real hardware if possible.

>> 2) The qemu interface does not have the correct MAC address. It gains a
>> seemingly random address that is inconsistent across reboots.
> 
> Oh fun, I should have known that allowing tun/tap devices to be
> special-cased would come back to bite us. The issue here is that we
> create tun/tap devices using an ioctl rather than the standard rtnl
> interface. This ioctl does not allow us to set MTU, mac address etc.
> We would have to fix that up after creating the device (over rtnl).
> 
> I think the best solution would be to simply add support to the kernel
> for creating persistent tun/tap links over rtnl (seems like it should
> be very simple), so I don't think we should work around this in
> networkd. In the meantime, I will add warnings/documentation to
> networkd so people know that this won't work.

I didn't know you can "simply" fix anything in the kernel. With the
general inertia of kernel development, such a fix would take between 4
and 6 months to be available in a mainline release. Personally, I'd opt
for the two-step process with ioctl+rtnl, which we could drop as soon as
a new rtnl interface has existed for some time.

> For those who need the functionality, a work-aronud is to do it by
> dropping in a .link file, matching on the interface name.

That was my first idea (before I even considered using a .netdev unit),
since the tap interface was created by vde_switch. Here's the thing:
.link units cannot match on names.

There is no workaround for this problem with networkd only.


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