Comment 11 for bug 1728134

So it looks like there is no support in networkd for ovs: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2613

There is limited support in NM: https://developer.gnome.org/NetworkManager/unstable/nm-openvswitch.html - I don't know if that's landed in a release yet.

So this looks like it would probably require either networkmanager, which most servers don't usually install, or its own backend. That would be awkward too: netplan is run at boot as a systemd generator - a short running one-shot process. It's not its own part of the boot process (it's not a systemd unit), and it's definitely not as a long-running daemon.

We're also going to have to deal with the fact that OVS config is automatically persistent, which is also different to the way netplan does things (making ephemeral files and putting them in /run). You can recover almost any netplan issue by making sure the YAML is valid and rebooting; this stops being true with OVS.

This will require some proper design and thought.