Failed to add tap interface to bridge 'br0': No such device ¶

These messages mean that the bridge device specified in the domain's <interface> definition doesn't exist.

You can verify that the bridge device doesn't exist with the shell command "ifconfig br0" (or whatever device name was given in the error message) - if it returns a message like the following, then the host has no bridge by that name:

br0: error fetching interface information: Device not found

If something like the following is returned, then you have a different problem, and must look elsewhere for a solution:

br0       Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:00:5A:11:70:48
          inet addr:10.22.1.5  Bcast:10.255.255.255  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:249841 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:281948 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:106327234 (101.4 MiB)  TX bytes:21182634 (20.2 MiB)

Solution ¶

Either use "virsh edit $guestname" to change the <interface> definition to use a bridge or network that already exists (e.g. change "type='bridge'" to "type='network'", and "<source bridge='br0'/>" to "<source network='default'/>", or add the given bridge device to the host system configuration.

Create a Host Bridge Using virsh ¶

If you have libvirt >= 0.9.8 and your distro supports the virsh iface-* commands (e.g. RHEL and Fedora) a bridge device can be created in one easy step with the "virsh iface-bridge" command. The following command will create a bridge device "br0" that has interface "eth0" attached:

virsh iface-bridge eth0 br0

You can later remove this bridge and restore the original eth0 configuration with:

virsh iface-unbridge br0

Create a Host Bridge Manually ¶

For older versions of libvirt and other OS distros that don't support the virsh iface-*, you can manually create a bridge device on the host using these instructions .