Note: This bug is displayed in read-only format because the product is no longer active in Red Hat Bugzilla.

RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

Requires backport of upstream patches:


https://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/commit/?id=ca4e28ea2b6d7b6294962bd7cda7428dfee6842c
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/commit/?id=b2686110ef9cfcd87470d65872abf4adb9dab37c

Notes for QA:

When NM now changes the MAC address, it first tries to do so without taking the interface down. That is preferred, because taking an interface down causes kernel to drop IPv4 routes and IPv6 addresses and routes. In particular, that is bad if the user added them externally (e.g. with a dispatcher scripts).

So, NM tries to avoid taking it down, except:

 - not for Wi-Fi devices (see bug 1656157)

 - if changing the MAC address fails, NM assumes it was because the driver didn't allow to change the MAC address while being up. In that case, NM takes the interface down, tries again to set the MAC address, and takes the interface up again.