Bridged networking in macOS Catalina (qemu 5.1.0)

[Stefan Nilsson]

Hello!

I’m trying to provide a bridged network access to a Linux guest running in qemu 5.1 on macOS Catalina (10.15.7) but I’m unable to recieve any data packets on ‘tap0’ from bridge.

The setup is as follows:

Linux Guest (qemu) - Running qemu-…. -net nic -net tap

macOS Network:

bridge1

 - member en0

 - member tap0 (verified being connected to qemu process)

Using tcpdump to monitor network traffic I can see DHCPREQUESTs being sent from ‘tap0', to ‘en0' (via ‘bridge1').

A second later, a DHCPOFFER is being received (by a LAN connected router) by ‘bridge1’, but never forwarded to ‘tap0’.

tap0 is being reached by (guest’s) DHCPREQUEST but no incoming packets (i.e. DHCPOFFERS).

Have tried to set the IP address in Linux guest manually without further success.

So, has anyone gotten bridged networking on macoS Catalina to work with qemu and can share some hints?

Best Regards,

Stefan Nilsson