The way initscripts model OVS, correspond not directly to how OVS sees it. NetworkManager follows closer to OVS' model, and thus it is not compatible with initscripts'.

See `man nm-openvswitch` for examples.

Especially, you can not persist OVS connection profiles in ifcfg file format. Only keyfile format is supported (detailed in `man nm-settings-keyfile`). But commonly, you would not edit files directly, but use the D-Bus API (or one of the client tools, like nmcli).


The way to use NetworkManager is by first creating the suitable profiles ("connections").
Then, in a second step, activate the profile with `nmcli connection up "$PROFILE"`.

Can we make the initscript method work in some way? Can this bz become a request for enhancement?

Theoretically possible, in practice probably not.

Can you elaborate on the value of that? How would you like to use that? It would be a larger effort, for something that does not seem like the right approach. 


If you choose to use NetworkManager instead of initscripts (which we think you should and which we would love to see!!), then you anyway would need to adjust your integration from using initscript to talking to NetworkManager. At that point, you preferably would no longer just dump ifcfg files, but talk NetworkManager API.
Dumping files is not the optimal way to use NetworkManager.

If you really just want to dump files, you can put them in keyfile format to /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections. See `man nm-settings-keyfile` for some details about the file format. Also, if you are interested in how the file would look like, a try+error approach seems helpful too. I mean: first use nmcli to configure the desired profile, and look how the generated profile looks in keyfile format. See examples in `man nm-openvswitch`.

I'm closing this. It works as designed, that is, poorly.

Unfortunately there's not much we can do about keeping compatible with the poor design of openvswitch ifcfg files.