The number of VMs exceeds the system limit

[mnm364]

Cross-posted from #1217.

Hey all, having an issue with starting and stopping multiple tahoe images sequentially. I don't believe I am doing anything fancy but keep running into the following error from my macOS host after starting and gracefully stopping a tart guest a couple times.

The number of VMs exceeds the system limit

Detailed Reproduction

$ tart clone ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-tahoe-vanilla:26.2 my-tahoe
$ tart run my-tahoe
<<<Within guest: Apple Menu -> Shut Down>>>
guest has stopped the virtual machine
$ tart list
Source Name        Disk Size Accessed       State
local  my-tahoe    50   25   3 minutes ago  stopped
$ tart run my-tahoe
<<<Within guest: Apple Menu -> Shut Down>>>
guest has stopped the virtual machine
$ tart list
Source Name        Disk Size Accessed       State
local  my-tahoe    50   25   45 seconds ago stopped
$ tart run my-tahoe
The number of VMs exceeds the system limit

I have also tried variants of using tart stop my-tahoe to stop the VMs from the host as well as running sudo shutdown -h now from the guest in lieu of clicking through to shutdown through the macOS menus. Both bring me back to the same broken state.

Here is my host system configuration:

$ tart --version
2.31.0

$ sw_vers
ProductName:		macOS
ProductVersion:		26.3.1
BuildVersion:		25D2128

To get out of this state I need to restart my host macOS machine, which basically makes this unusable for me. Has anyone else run into this or worked around it? Any help appreciated. Thanks!

[DrDonk]

Apple only allows 2 macOS VMs to run at the same time, it is a macOS restriction. It affects all programs that virtualise macOS on M series chips.