Over on the Fediverse, I shared a discovery :

This is my (sad) face that Linux interfaces have a maximum name length. What do you mean I can't call this VLAN interface 'vlan22-matterlab'?

Also, this is my annoyed face that Canonical Netplan doesn't check or report this problem/restriction. Instead your VLAN interface just doesn't get created, and you have to go look at system logs to find systemd-networkd telling you about it.

(This is my face about Netplan in general, of course. The sooner it gets yeeted the better.)

Based on both some Internet searches and looking at kernel headers, I believe the limit is 15 characters for the primary name of an interface. In headers, you will find this called IFNAMSIZ (the kernel) or IF_NAMESIZE (glibc), and it's defined to be 16 but that includes the trailing zero byte for C strings.

(I can be confident that the limit is 15, not 16, because 'vlan22-matterlab' is exactly 16 characters long without a trailing zero byte. Take one character off and it works.)

At the level of ip commands, the error message you get is on the unhelpful side:

# ip link add dev vlan22-matterlab type wireguard
Error: Attribute failed policy validation.

(I picked the type for illustration purposes.)

Systemd-networkd gives you a much better error message:

/run/systemd/network/10-netplan-vlan22-matterlab.netdev:2: Interface name is not valid or too long, ignoring assignment: vlan22-matterlab

(Then you get some additional errors because there's no name.)

As mentioned in my Fediverse post , Netplan tells you nothing. One direct consequence of this is that in any context where you're writing down your own network interface names, such as VLANs or WireGuard interfaces , simply having 'netplan try' or 'netplan apply' succeed without errors does not mean that your configuration actually works. You'll need to look at error logs and perhaps inventory all your network devices.

( This isn't the first time I've seen Netplan behave this way , and it remains just as dangerous.)

As covered in the ip link manual page, network interfaces can have either or both of aliases and 'altname' properties. These alternate names can be (much) longer than 16 characters, and the 'ip link property' altname property can be used in various contexts to make things convenient (I'm not sure what good aliases are, though). However this is somewhat irrelevant for people using Netplan, because the current Netplan YAML doesn't allow you to set interface altnames.

You can set altnames in networkd .link files, as covered in the systemd.link manual page. The direct thing you want is AlternativeName= , but apparently you may also want to set a blank alternative names policy, AlternativeNamesPolicy= . Of course this probably only helps if you're using systemd-networkd directly, instead of through Netplan.

PS: Netplan itself has the notion of Ethernet interfaces having symbolic names, such as 'vlanif0', but this is purely internal to Netplan; it's not manifested as an actual interface altname in the 'rendered' systemd-networkd control files that Netplan writes out.

(Technically this applies to all physical device types .)