Greetings,

yes, that the ovs bridge is down is normal behaviour.
In our deployment the ovn bgp agent systemd unit has a ExecStartPre condition to bring up the interface before the agent starts.

Also the ovn bgp agent got a patch to do this automatically: https://github.com/openstack/ovn-bgp-agent/commit/fa344056c8c98b537cf222434062f7714ee0ca88
This patch is in release >= 5.0.0

Best Regards
Max

From: anas.jouhdy@gmail.com <anas.jouhdy@gmail.com>
Sent: 14 January 2026 16:34
To: openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org <openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org>
Subject: [neutron][ovn-bgp-agent] ovs bridges down causes error when configuring route table
 
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Hi,

I am trying to use the OVN BGP agent (nb_ovn_bgp_driver with the exposing method underlay) and I would like to share a difficulty that I found, it might be related to the specific deployment that I have using Kayobe.

I find that by default my openvswitch bridges appear to be down when I list them with "ip link". From what I saw in some forums this is a normal behaviour.
The thing is that the OVN BGP agent uses ip link, for example here [1], to add route to a table link to these bridges and if there are down, this raise an error(pyroute2.netlink.exceptions.NetlinkError: (100, 'Network is down')). When I set the bridge state UP with "ip link" it solves the issue but this solution is not reboot persistent.

Is it really a normal behaviour to have the openvswitch bridges down or is it a problem that I need to investigate on my configuration ? If this is a normal behaviour, anyone found a workaround that could be resilient in production (that is reboot persistent) ?

Do not hesitate if you need more information on my configuration !

[1]:
 https://urlsand.esvalabs.com/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fopendev.org%2Fopenstack%2Fovn-bgp-agent%2Fsrc%2Fbranch%2Fmaster%2Fovn_bgp_agent%2Futils%2Flinux_net.py%23L293&e=50525cf7&h=ac6457ba&f=y&p=y

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