How to expose an Incus (VM) to the network as if it were it's own device aka assign an own IP (not bridging) in IncusOS? Including mDNS support? MacVLan parent not selectable?

Incus
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Okay, I stand corrected. Do not create a macvlan in IncusOS!

As @stgraber warned me:

macvlan interacts differently with each NIC vendor driver making its behavior rather inconsistent. Since IncusOS does quite a bunch of weird stuff with networking, […], we really can’t predict how that will conflict with various NIC drivers.

So you can go through Incus […], but it’s perfectly possible that the next version of IncusOS will change [… something…,] which could lead to your system completely failing to come online.

(Highlighting by myself)

Actually, all it takes for the use case to solve, is already documented in the IncusOS documentation:

Here is also the short summary.

My two cents about this:

  1. Understand these YAML configurations first. You can edit them via CLI or in the UI (OS → network).
  2. Especially, as for assigning the roles, please note to not edit the shown state: part in the YAML, but the config: part! If you use the wrong one, you will not see an error, but just no reaction. state: can be ignored, it’s just reflecting… well… the current state.
  3. Thus you can do everything in the GUI (which is great!), you just need to know how and enabling/adding the instances role for your network interface is the key here! You can then just select that as a “parent” in the UI.
  4. Personally, I also would not name each interface with the same name as the docs say, to not get lost in what is what.

Edit: This thread shows exactly the same solution: