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

Incus
,
1

Use case

I am still at setting up Home Assistant and it has two cool (network) features:

  • AFAIK it advertises homassistant as the hostname, so you can reach it under homeassistant.local.
  • It uses things like mDNS (or apparently other methods) to auto-discover other (IoT etc.) devices. This has not worked for me in bridge mode (or I am too dumb to see it).

Also:

  • With MQTT etc. it can have quite a lot of ports to expose, which is cumbersome if you reach it under the same IP as the Incus host.

Problem

The default network (in IncusOS) is a NAT bridge apparently. However, for this VM, IMHO, a different networking would be great, but I was unable to configure it.

Tried solutions

MacVLan

I found How to use my local lan instead of incus network? Ipv4 and ipv6? - #4 by simos which seems to be exactly what I want.

Also the doc seems to describe Macvlan as exactly what I want.
However, in the Incus-UI aka the GUI, I need to provide one required parameter named parent.
The problem is: what parent network(?) should I add here? If I could, I would add my ethernet interface, but the second problem is: In the UI the dropdown is empty – I literally cannot create and configure a macvlan network:

Create network GUI in IncusOS for Macvlan, parent shows "No networks available"
Create network GUI in IncusOS for Macvlan, parent shows "No networks available"1290×876 61.6 KB

Keep the bridge but configure it

Initially when I read I could just disable nat in the bridge options, I thought this setting could help achieve my goal. Problem is: It does not, I guess it just routes/“bridges” nothing from the “outside LAN” then.

I however also found this article, but it looks really like a vibdecoded/LLMed website and I do not really think all makes sense there. Aka there is a YAML config in the (low resolution) screenshot (that is to be added in the GUI) that is totally different from what is shown before.

Questions

So what is the suggested approach here? What may I be doing wrong?