Yes, the dreaded Apple Firewall bug:( The cause is that somehow the firewall would block macOS's own bootpd process and that it the process responsible for handing out IP addresses to the virtual machine instances. We could never find out why macOS chose to block bootpd though.
Anecdotally, the number of users mentioning this issue have been much less lately, but I'm not sure if that is because the new Multipass release which has a newer QEMU made it better, a macOS update fixed it, or users have just given up.
I gave up on using VMs on my work Mac (Linux user at home). When I get round to trying the Ventura upgrade, I'll give it another go.
The annoying thing was that multipass and UTM would initially work before the firewall killed it a few days later. Makes me think it was learning from heuristics or something rather than being a defined policy.
Would you mind expanding some more on your use case and what is missing in Multipass? If it's static IPs, then as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36693413, there are ways to accomplish this.
Have you seen https://multipass.run/docs/configure-static-ips for configuring static IP's? It's kind of Linux-centric as far as setting up the bridge on the host is concerned, but as long as you create a bridge as you see fit on any host, then the rest of the instructions should work.
Yes, the dreaded Apple Firewall bug:( The cause is that somehow the firewall would block macOS's own bootpd process and that it the process responsible for handing out IP addresses to the virtual machine instances. We could never find out why macOS chose to block bootpd though.
Anecdotally, the number of users mentioning this issue have been much less lately, but I'm not sure if that is because the new Multipass release which has a newer QEMU made it better, a macOS update fixed it, or users have just given up.