How to Remove virbr0 and lxcbr0 Interfaces on CentOS/RHEL 6,7?

Updated: 28 September 2026 · Applies to: Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 12, AlmaLinux 9 and Rocky Linux 9

RHEL/CentOS 6 and 7 are end of life; these steps are for Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 12, AlmaLinux 9 and Rocky Linux 9. A server with one network card may still show extra interfaces such as virbr0 and lxcbr0. They are harmless, but you can remove them if you do not use virtual machines or containers.

Where these interfaces come from

• virbr0 (usually 192.168.122.1) is the default NAT network of libvirt, the KVM virtual machine manager.
• lxcbr0 is the bridge of LXC containers.
• docker0 belongs to Docker. Do not remove it while Docker is in use.

Remove virbr0

If you do not run virtual machines on the server, stop the default network and keep it from starting:

virsh net-list --all
virsh net-destroy default
virsh net-autostart default --disable

Or remove libvirt completely: dnf remove libvirt-daemon (AlmaLinux/Rocky) or apt remove libvirt-daemon-system (Ubuntu/Debian).

Remove lxcbr0

systemctl disable --now lxc-net
# and set USE_LXC_BRIDGE="false" in /etc/default/lxc-net (Ubuntu/Debian)

Check the result with ip link.