I run OpenStack on my laptop, and I’ve been chasing down a pernicious problem with OVS bridge interfaces under both F19 and F20. My OpenStack environment relies on an OVS bridge device named br-ex for external connectivity and for making services available to OpenStack instances, but after rebooting, br-ex was consistently unconfigured, which caused a variety of problems.

This is the network configuration file for br-ex on my system:

DEVICE=br-ex
DEVICETYPE=ovs
TYPE=OVSBridge
BOOTPROT=static
IPADDR=192.168.200.1
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ONBOOT=yes
NM_CONTROLLED=no
ZONE=openstack

Running ifup br-ex would also fail to configure the interface, but running ifdown br-ex; ifup br-ex would configure things appropriately.

I finally got fed up with this behavior and spent some time chasing down the problem, and this is what I found:

  • Calling ifup br-ex passes control to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-ovs.

  • ifup-ovs calls the check_device_down function from network-functions, which looks like:

      check_device_down ()
  {
       [ ! -d /sys/class/net/$1 ] && return 0
       if LC_ALL=C ip -o link show dev $1 2>/dev/null | grep -q ",UP" ; then
          return 1
       else
          return 0
       fi
  }

This returns failure (=1) if the interface flags contain ,UP. Unfortunately, since information about this device is stored persistently in ovsdb, the device is already UP when ifup is called, which causes ifup-ovs to skip further device configuration. The logic that calls check_device_down looks like this:

if check_device_down "${DEVICE}"; then
        ovs-vsctl -t ${TIMEOUT} -- --may-exist add-br "$DEVICE" $OVS_OPTIONS \
        ${OVS_EXTRA+-- $OVS_EXTRA} \
        ${STP+-- set bridge "$DEVICE" stp_enable="${STP}"}
else
        OVSBRIDGECONFIGURED="yes"
fi

This sets OVSBRIDGECONFIGURED if it believes the device is UP, which causes ifup-ovs to skip the call to ifup-eth to configure the interface:

if [ "${OVSBOOTPROTO}" != "dhcp" ] && [ -z "${OVSINTF}" ] && \
        [ "${OVSBRIDGECONFIGURED}" != "yes" ]; then
        ${OTHERSCRIPT} ${CONFIG}
fi

I have found that the simplest solution to this problem is to disable the logic that sets OVSBRIDGECONFIGURED, by changing this:

else
        OVSBRIDGECONFIGURED="yes"
fi

To this:

else
        : OVSBRIDGECONFIGURED="yes"
fi

With this change in place, br-ex is correctly configured after a reboot.