Bug#1127478: network-manager: Enable Open vSwitch (OVS) plugin

[Michael Biebl]

Hi Enrique

On Mon, 9 Feb 2026 14:21:34 +0100 Enrique Llorente Pastora <ellor...@redhat.com> wrote:

Package: network-manager
Version: 1.54.3-1
Severity: wishlist

The Open vSwitch (OVS) plugin is currently disabled in the Debian
network-manager build [1][2]. The use case we have is using
NetworkManager with OVS as part of Kubernetes KIND clusters this way
users can use kubernetes-nmstate [3] to configure cluster networking.

I think the build change is minimal — it requires passing the appropriate
configure flag to enable OVS support during package build.

I've pushed some preliminary changes to the feature/ovs branch. See

https://salsa.debian.org/utopia-team/network-manager/-/commit/c6c1f1ad5e15e6c712f8cc2a9c7aee4eefa2b1ee

Enabling ovs support results in a drop-in file being installed:
/usr/lib/systemd/system/NetworkManager.service.d/NetworkManager-ovs.conf
which changes the ordering of NetworkManager.service.



Then again, I looked into NetworkManager-ovs.conf, which contains:

[Unit]
After=openvswitch.service


In Debian, there is no package openvswitch.service though:

$ apt-file search -x "/usr/lib/systemd/system/openvswitch*"
openvswitch-ipsec: /usr/lib/systemd/system/openvswitch-ipsec.service
openvswitch-switch: /usr/lib/systemd/system/openvswitch-switch.service


Any thoughts here?


Michael

So splitting of the ovs plugin related files into a dedicated package seemed like the way to go. As mentioned in our private conversation, I'm not familiar with OVS and lack a setup to test the resulting package.

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