Most of the comments are from past versions of the document. I debated removing them but the issue with ping acting weird remains so I decided to leave the comments for now.

But networking in general appears to work, aside from the ping strangeness.

For example, using pkg to install packages works fine. Likewise, portsnap fetch extract, and when you build packages from ports the system is able to fetch over the network without apparent issues.

Edit: I cleaned up the comments on the gist a little, leaving the ones that are still relevant (the ones about ping), while removing some comments that were talking about problems that are out of date.

Cool. I'll give it a try then.

I didn't even know you could remove comments on a gist. TIL.

It looks like the vmnet patches made it into QEMU - maybe try setting the network device to use that:

-netdev vmnet-macos,id=net,mode=bridged -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net

Note: You'll need to run QEMU as root to use vmnet, non-root usage requires an entitlement.

QEMU needed to be patched for network to work on M1 Mac hosts back then. I don’t know if the patches landed in newer versions of QEMU.