[pve-devel] [RFC pve-installer v3] fix #6508: auto-installer/post-hook: make iface mac address optional

[Christian Ebner]

On 7/14/25 21:27, Thomas Lamprecht wrote:
> Am 11.07.25 um 17:34 schrieb Christian Ebner:
>> This is a breaking change as it affects the answer file fetch payload,
>> the mac address now being optional. The version is therefore bumped.
> 
> Meh, not a big fan - we could rather serialize it to "unknown" and not
> bump the schema at all, that would IMO be much more pragmatic for us
> and admins relying on this already.
> 
> Internally it could still be an option, that would make use sites of
> that information aware about that it might not be usable.
> 
> OTOH, pondering also applying the "just skip" patch for now, while that
> might be slightly worse UX, it's a rather unlikely edge case anyway,
> especially for servers, where even if such interfaces exists, they are
> probably not very likely to be usable after rebooting into the
> installed system anyway..

After having looked at the kernel interfaces for this I would argue that 
skipping these interfaces is the preferred option: They are not of type 
ethernet anyways as reported by addr_len in sysfs [0], so allowing to 
set these up as management interface without proper configuration makes 
not much sense IMO. Further, this would then need proper support for 
other interface types as well when reading `/sys/class/net/<iface>/address`.

We then still can decide to properly support such interfaces in the 
future, if the need to setup with them ever arises.

Of all 3 patch variants, the skipping seems to be the least invasive for 
the time being to me.

Please let me know how to proceed.


[0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-class-net