OpenVPN 2.6 automatic start on custom instance

SkyBeam

My use-case:
OpenVPN running as custom instance on on Windows.

HKLM\Software\OpenVPNmyinstance created and config_dir, config_ext, exe_path, log_dir and log_append defined
Service created running "openvpnserv.exe -instance automatic myinstance"

Issue:
Automatic start of connection does not work in OpenVPN 2.6 any more. It was working fine in version 2.5.
In version 2.5 this workied just fine and auto-running the VPN configuration placed in config_dir.
In version 2.6 the service does not even start as it seems the "automatic" option got completely removed. The help of openvpnserv looks kind of strange now as "-instance" only taking a fixed "interactive" option now - so why specifying the option if it actually needs to be hard-coded to "interactive"?

The issue is I cannot get OpenVPN 2.6 to automatically start a connection on service run with a custom service as the "automatic" option seems to have been removed and therefore the functionality is broken and compatibility to existing tooling as well.

What I tried as well:
Running "openvpnserv.exe -instance interactive myinstance" and adding autostart_config_dir to HKLM\Software\OpenVPNmyinstance.
It seems that custom instance information is completely ignored here too. Even when placing the configuration to the default config-auto folder the service will not start it. So it looks like the instance is hard-wired to only interactive use.

Does anyone know how I could configure a dedicated instance which will auto-start any connectivity?

Unfortunately I can't launch the connection directly as I need to use a service due to the fact wintun (which I like to use) requires the connection to be launched by a SYSTEM service. So I am stuck as I cannot run a custom service to auto-start a connection. Only option I would have is to launch the default service and place its configuration into config-auto. But the default service might contain other connection configurations already which I don't want to run. This is the reason to create a custom service in first place.

Do I miss something or is the custom service auto-connect functionality completely broken in version 2.6?

SkyBeam

I spent a bit more time on this topic and found some answers but not a solution:

OpenVPN 2.6 seems to split the functionality into two services
- openvpnserv.exe: This service is used only to communicate with the GUI allowing users to interactively start/stop connections from the config/ folder.
- openvpnserv2.exe: This service is new and is used only to auto-start connections from config-auto/ folder.

Unfortunately it looks like openvpnserv2.exe is missing the functionality to specify a custom instance name which would make it read the paths from HKLM\SOFTWARE\OpenVPN<instance>. IN fact it does not seem to accept any parameters. So it is not possible to create a custom service which is handling the auto-start connections from a dedicated folder.

In regards to wintun I have started to move to the new ovpn-dco driver.
Although also this seems to lack some implementation parts. For example I was unable to find a way to bind a connection to a specific interface. While wintun offering to use "dev-node interface-name" and "windows-driver wintun" in *.ovpn configuration this seems not to be supported for "windows-driver ovpn-dco" and it just randomly selects an interface.