This irked me recently. I think it’s very reasonable for networkd to delegate everything after the interface meets an “online criteria” to later services. However I was disappointed that you couldn’t then tell networkd an interface was “active” (vs. online) later down the line.
Would be interested to hear how you & others approach this. Perhaps I’m not thinking systemd-y enough hah.
Can you describe your use case in a bit more detail? (Also to make sure it’s not really a XY problem)
systemd-networkd sure keeps some state tracking. There are systems where it’s the only thing managing the network, so it doesn’t have anything to delegate to. You can see it by running networkctl before and after yanking the Ethernet cable.
Would be interested to hear how you & others approach this. Perhaps I’m not thinking systemd-y enough hah.