Interface name changed after Proxmox update 8.4.1

[stemid]

What I noticed this morning is the NIC in Linux VMs had changed name from enp6s18 to ens18, this broke a lot of network configs.

It happened because the VM was configured to auto-patch from Fedora CoreOS 41.20250331.3.0 to 42.20250410.3.1, after this reboot the NIC changed name from enp6s18 to ens18. Curiously the new NIC listed altnames that I had never seen before, I don't have the list now because I had to rollback to fix some incidents.

My proxmox team recently upgraded to 8.4.1 so I'm just wondering if this upgrade could have influenced the NIC name change in any way? Or if it was 100% the fault of Fedora CoreOS.

The VMs are configured to use virtio networking with a bridge vmbr0 that all our VMs use. The guest OS is Fedora CoreOS 41.

 

[fabian]

this can happen with kernel or udev/systemd updates, such as when upgrading major versions of a distro or using a rolling release one. if you want to avoid it, you need to give your NICs persisten names based on some stable identifier (MAC, hardware slot, ..)