Network Device Selector

Configuring Network Device Using Device Selector

deviceSelector is an alternative method of configuring a network device:

machine:
  ...
  network:
    interfaces:
      - deviceSelector:
          driver: virtio
          hardwareAddr: "00:00:*"
        address: 192.168.88.21

Selector has the following traits:

• qualifiers match a device by reading the hardware information in /sys/class/net/...
• qualifiers are applied using logical AND
• machine.network.interfaces.deviceConfig option is mutually exclusive with machine.network.interfaces.interface
• the selector is invalid when it matches multiple devices, the controller will fail and won’t create any devices for the malformed selector

The available hardware information used in the selector can be observed in the LinkStatus resource (works in maintenance mode):

# talosctl get links eth0 -o yaml
spec:
  ...
  hardwareAddr: 4e:95:8e:8f:e4:47
  busPath: 0000:06:00.0
  driver: alx
  pciID: 1969:E0B1

Using Device Selector for Bonding

Device selectors can be used to configure bonded interfaces:

machine:
  ...
  network:
    interfaces:
      - interface: bond0
        bond:
          mode: balance-rr
          deviceSelectors:
            - hardwareAddr: '00:50:56:8e:8f:e4'
            - hardwareAddr: '00:50:57:9c:2c:2d'

In this example, the bond0 interface will be created and bonded using two devices with the specified hardware addresses.

Use Case

machine.network.interfaces.interface name is generated by the Linux kernel and can be changed after a reboot. Device names can change when the system has several interfaces of the same kind, e.g: eth0, eth1.

In that case pinning it to hardwareAddress will make Talos reliably configure the device even when interface name changes.