waveform80

A partially facile suggestion, but it sounds like what you want is the Pi 400's board design; unfortunately there's no Pi 500, yet!

The current form-factor is based on the B+ (the B had ports on every single side, if you count the GPIO pins, while the B+ moved the power round to the same side as the HDMI), and I suspect part of the reason for sticking with the form factor is the HAT specification (which specifies physical layout as well as electrical and software requirements), which I think was published at the same time as the B+ was released (my memory's fuzzy on that point, though).

Fair comment; and you're correct that (to the best of my knowledge) we don't specifically test VLANs on the pi platform at the moment (the majority of the automated testing performed directly on pis is pi-specific hardware compatibility: boot, wifi, bluetooth, etc. etc.)

Something vaguely similar came up back in hirsute with the veth module (preventing containers from configuring ethernet): another thing that wasn't pi specific. That got resolved by moving veth back (which will almost certainly be the resolution in this case). I've found what I suspect is the ticket you mentioned (LP: #1973485) and though it looks like the kernel team have picked it up, it's not resolved yet. I'll see what I can do to get it some more priority (at the very least it should be dealt with prior to the point release).

I've added VLANs to the release notes in the meantime, however, I can't add the full list of functionality because the list is frankly enormous (well over 1000 modules).

What were the changes in 22.04 on the Pi server images that severely impacted you?

(disclosure: I'm probably the one that made those changes, so apologies for that, but I'd like to know what they were in case there's anything I can do about them)