The same PF bug is breaking one of OrbStack's networking features. I found it hard to believe when I narrowed it down to this, but I guess I'm not alone. Really hoping this is fixed before the stable release.
I didn't get a chance to report this to Apple until yesterday, but I think it's a fairly recent regression, probably from around beta 6.
PF is supposed to be a last-match firewall but it's almost like macOS is doing first-match now: an earlier "block" rule (without "quick") is overriding "pass" rules in a different anchor, which obviously breaks things.
"really hope" is too weak. This has to be fixed before release. A stable release with this would be unacceptable and would be reason for me to abandon Mac OS. You don't deliver a product with this kind of regression if you want it to be used for any kind of serious business
Maybe you don't deliver products like that, but Apple delivers them all the time. Then you have to desperately raise noise on all possible forums, and hope to catch the eye of someone who actually works at a relevant team at Apple, before your customers get too tired of the issues caused by the bug and abandon you.
This is not an Apple-specific issue either, Microsoft works just the same. Large OS releases are a massive undertaking, and the release train don't stop for a
firewall bug - no matter how severe the bug is for the people it does affect.
I remember the time around iOS 5-6, they made some delays and probably it fired back on them and since they have delay related PTSD as an organization. I think since then they just have to push whatever it takes. I remember after iOS 7 I almost left the ecosystem it was so buggy and almost unusable. They probably measured it because after maybe iOS 9-10 they started to be very proud of fixing and stabilizing stuff even in product announcement and iOS is very stable now, not recognizing an issue for years maybe. But this had a price, they paid it, now they seem very aggressive on schedules until the next major clusterfucky year.
Half the time I hear of Mac OS updates, it's people having their Macs bricked because they didn't wait for patches to the main release to come out. Every major release seems to have major issues. At least this doesn't render your Mac completely useless.
I didn't get a chance to report this to Apple until yesterday, but I think it's a fairly recent regression, probably from around beta 6.
PF is supposed to be a last-match firewall but it's almost like macOS is doing first-match now: an earlier "block" rule (without "quick") is overriding "pass" rules in a different anchor, which obviously breaks things.