Hi Laine,

Thank you so much for your analysis and thoughtful insights. As you noticed straight away, there were indeed some minor differences in the two VM definitions that I didn't see before posting. The interface naming was not biased by this in the end.

Anyway, we found out that the problem actually lay in qemu 6.0.0, which was promptly patched by its maintainers after we contacted them:

Thanks again!

Riccardo