V2: - removed change from virDomainNetDefFormat. The reported problem also does not occur. During a shutdown/restart cycle libvirtd forgot the macvtap device name that it had created on behalf of a VM so that a stale macvtap device remained on the host when the VM terminated. Libvirtd has to actively tear down a macvtap device and it uses its name for identifying which device to tear down. The solution is to not blank out the <target dev='...'/> completely, but only blank it out on VMs that are not active. So, if a VM is active, the device name makes it into the XML and is also being parsed. If a VM is not active, the device name is discarded. Signed-off-by: Stefan Berger <stefanb@us.ibm.com> --- src/conf/domain_conf.c | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) Index: libvirt-acl/src/conf/domain_conf.c =================================================================== --- libvirt-acl.orig/src/conf/domain_conf.c +++ libvirt-acl/src/conf/domain_conf.c @@ -2343,7 +2343,8 @@ virDomainNetDefParseXML(virCapsPtr caps, def->data.direct.linkdev = dev; dev = NULL; - VIR_FREE(ifname); + if ((flags & VIR_DOMAIN_XML_INACTIVE)) + VIR_FREE(ifname); break;