No network connection after update to HAOS 18.3

[NickW]

Yesterday, I lost my network connection on my NUC / x86-64 Home Assistant OS installation after updating from HAOS 18.2 to 18.3.

Network setup:

• Physical Ethernet interface: enp1s0
• RTL8111/8168/8411 Ethernet Controller using the r8169 driver
• VLAN interface: enp1s0.20
• Static IPv4 address on VLAN20

Immediately after upgrading to HAOS 18.3, the Ethernet interface stopped functioning correctly.

After logging in to the CLI, it repeatedly showed:
rtl_rxtx_empty_cond == 0

followed by:
NETDEV WATCHDOG: CPU: 1: transmit queue 0 timed out

Home Assistant OS, Supervisor and the containers themselves continued to boot, but the host had no functional network connectivity. The HA configuration files were still present on de drive.

I switched the HAOS boot slot back to 18.2 using ha os boot-slot other. After rebooting into 18.2, the errors disappeared immediately and the same network configuration and hardware worked normally again.

No router, switch, cabling or VLAN configuration was changed between the 18.3 and 18.2 boots.
This therefore appears reproducible as an HAOS 18.3 or Realtek NIC issue.

[jim_os]

@NickW

or Realtek NIC issue

There are already several issue reports regarding problems with Realtek NICs in HAOS 18.3. Example:

r8169: NETDEV WATCHDOG tx timeouts on HAOS 18.3 (kernel 6.18.52) with 802.1Q VLAN interfaces