I hit this problem recently when trying to create a bridge with an IPv6
address on a 3.2 kernel: dnsmasq (and, further, radvd) would not bind to
the given address, waiting 20s and then giving up with -EADDRNOTAVAIL
(resp. exiting immediately with "error parsing or activating the config
file", without libvirt noticing it, BTW). This can be reproduced with (I
think) any kernel >= 2.6.39 and the following XML (to be used with
"virsh net-create"):

        <network>
          <name>test-bridge</name>
          <bridge name='testbr0' />
          <ip family='ipv6' address='fd00::1' prefix='64'>
          </ip>
        </network>

(it happens even when you have an IPv4, too)

The problem is that since commit [1] (which, ironically, was made to
“help IPv6 autoconfiguration”) the linux bridge code makes bridges
behave like “real” devices regarding carrier detection. This makes the
bridges created by libvirt, which are started without any up devices,
stay with the NO-CARRIER flag set, and thus prevents DAD (Duplicate
address detection) from happening, thus letting the IPv6 address flagged
as “tentative”. Such addresses cannot be bound to (see RFC 2462), so
dnsmasq fails binding to it (for radvd, it detects that "interface XXX
is not RUNNING", thus that "interface XXX does not exist, ignoring the
interface" (sic)). It seems that this behavior was enhanced somehow with
commit [2] by avoiding setting NO-CARRIER on empty bridges, but I
couldn't reproduce this behavior on my kernel. Anyway, with the “dummy
tap to set MAC address” trick, this wouldn't work.

To fix this, the idea is to get the bridge's attached device to be up so
that DAD can happen (deactivating DAD altogether is not a good idea, I
think). Currently, libvirt creates a dummy TAP device to set the MAC
address of the bridge, keeping it down. But even if we set this device
up, it is not RUNNING as soon as the tap file descriptor attached to it
is closed, thus still preventing DAD. So, we must modify the API a bit,
so that we can get the fd, keep the tap device persistent, run the
daemons, and close it after DAD has taken place. After that, the bridge
will be flagged NO-CARRIER again, but the daemons will be running, even
if not happy about the device's state (but we don't really care about
the bridge's daemons doing anything when no up interface is connected to
it).

Other solutions that I envisioned were:
      * Keeping the *-nic interface up: this would waste an fd for each
        bridge during all its life. May be acceptable, I don't really
        know.
      * Stop using the dummy tap trick, and set the MAC address directly
        on the bridge: it is possible since quite some time it seems,
        even if then there is the problem of the bridge not being
        RUNNING when empty, contrary to what [2] says, so this will need
        fixing (and this fix only happened in 3.1, so it wouldn't work
        for 2.6.39)
      * Using the --interface option of dnsmasq, but I saw somewhere
        that it's not used by libvirt for backward compatibility. I am
        not sure this would solve this problem, though, as I don't know
        how dnsmasq binds itself to it with this option.

This is why this patch does what's described earlier.

This patch also makes radvd start even if the interface is
“missing” (i.e. it is not RUNNING), as it daemonizes before binding to
it, and thus sometimes does it after the interface has been brought down
by us (by closing the tap fd), and then originally stops. This also
makes it stop yelling about it in the logs when the interface is down at
a later time.

[1]
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git;a=commit;h=1faa4356a3bd89ea11fb92752d897cff3a20ec0e
[2]
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git;a=commit;h=b64b73d7d0c480f75684519c6134e79d50c1b341