I recently found that systemd-networkd isn’t generating “up” events (or something similar, not posting from work) for bonded interfaces set up by cloud init which causes the network wait job to spin until it times out, adding about 60s to boot time for any debian-based box we run in our medium sized deploy, so maybe a few 1000. I noticed because my dev box took forever to come back after a kernel update and I was sweating that I’d broken something.

Unfortunately I was unable to allocate the time to figure out systemd at the layer where the event is expected but not generated to file a coherent bug. I ended up working around it several layers up by hard coding “bond0” as an argument in some config and moved on.

I don’t think openrc is perfect and I find broken shit in Alpine constantly but when I do it’s a whole lot easier to figure out what broke when you don’t have to dig through several layers of dbus event generators and consumers before figuring out what even happened.

I think I may be facing the exact same issue with bonded interfaces not being brought up properly (unrelated to cloud-init) and was hesitating if I should mention it as a caveat in the previous comment but maybe to your point I'm not 100% confident we're not missing anything in the configuration (:

For now an `ip link set up` hook has been a passable workaround here.

Yeah, the cloud init bit was from memory and might not even be right. What I found was that the dbus event doesn’t get generated for the bonded interface when it comes up.

This person blogged a bit and the details and fix don’t match my situation but the broad strokes do: https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Job_systemd-networkd-wa...