I have 18 VMs that are all supposed to attach to a NAT-bridge. 

The bridge definition seems to be ok - it used to work when I didn't have any guests defined.  It worked when I had only a couple guests defined.  Now that I have 18 of them, it seems to take more than a minute for virbr0 to come up, and the guests all fail to autostart because the bridge doesn't exist yet. 

The host system (AlmaLinux 9.4) has dual Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680v4 with plenty of cores and ram. 

Is there some easy way to delay the start of the guests to wait for virbr0 to be up?  Or can I specify a boot order?  I assume that libvirtd autostarts networks before guests but I really have no idea...  Can I specify an autostart dependency?

As a stopgap measure I turned 'autostart' off on these and made a systemd-run bash script that just starts the network, and then  starts the guests all serially.  It has worked 10 or so test boots in a row.  I'd prefer not to have to use an external script if possible. 

Fred Clift