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This is a more general case of https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1167852.

The RHEL7 guest image includes /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.  When booting in a recent vintage libvirt environment, the primary interface is named "ens3".

The result is that the system has no networking:

    # ip addr
    1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN
        link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
        inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
           valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
        inet6 ::1/128 scope host
           valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    2: ens3: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000
        link/ether 52:54:00:3a:47:7b brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

In many environments, the only means of ingress to a guest is through an ssh connection, so this renders the guest image largely useless.

The easiest -- an in my opinion, correct -- solution is to set "net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0" on the kernel command line to prevent the use of "(un)predictable device names".

Alternatively, one may be able to modify NetworkManager to attempt DHCP on all available interfaces, but I think this behavior would be less desireable.

See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1173230 for information on how to persistently set kernel boot options.

Sorry I made you open a bug for nothing, Lars. I just went through to review the outstanding bugs, and we appear to already have one out for a similar issue (not quite the same, but the fix will fix both).

I'm gonna close this and track it in bz#1167852

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1167852 ***

Ryan,

If you consider bz#1167852 to be a duplicate, that's fine by me.  I opened this because that bug was explicitly addressing SR-IOV environments, whereas I am making the case that we should be disabling predictable network unilaterally on the KVM guest image(s).

No, you're right that it's only reported against sr-iov. It's just that we're probably not going to put significant runtime logic into the guest image (that should all be done by components, basically), so the fix for both issues (disabling predictive naming in the boot loader) will be the same.

In essence, rather than writing some dracut hook which checks for sr-iov and disables in that case, we'll disable it everywhere, unless someone can make a compelling case for the "NM starts every interface" side or having predictive names in the guest image