Bhyve is a FreeBSD hypervisor. It first appeared in FreeBSD 10.0. However, it's
recommended to keep tracking FreeBSD 10-STABLE to make sure all new features
of bhyve are supported.
In order to enable bhyve on your FreeBSD host, you'll need to load the vmm
kernel module. Additionally, if_tap and if_bridge modules
should be loaded for networking support.
Additional information on bhyve could be obtained on bhyve.org.
The libvirt bhyve driver is a single-instance privileged driver. Some sample connection URIs are:
bhyve:///system (local access) bhyve+unix:///system (local access) bhyve+ssh://root@example.com/system (remote access, SSH tunnelled)
The bhyve driver in libvirt is in its early stage and under active development. So it supports only limited number of features bhyve provides. All the supported features could be found in this sample domain XML.
Note: in older libvirt versions, only a single network device and a single disk device were supported per-domain. However, since 1.2.6 the libvirt bhyve driver supports up to 31 PCI devices.
<domain type='bhyve'>
<name>bhyve</name>
<uuid>df3be7e7-a104-11e3-aeb0-50e5492bd3dc</uuid>
<memory>219136</memory>
<currentMemory>219136</currentMemory>
<vcpu>1</vcpu>
<os>
<type>hvm</type>
</os>
<features>
<apic/>
<acpi/>
</features>
<clock offset='utc'/>
<on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff>
<on_reboot>restart</on_reboot>
<on_crash>destroy</on_crash>
<devices>
<disk type='file'>
<driver name='file' type='raw'/>
<source file='/path/to/bhyve_freebsd.img'/>
<target dev='hda' bus='sata'/>
</disk>
<disk type='file' device='cdrom'>
<driver name='file' type='raw'/>
<source file='/path/to/cdrom.iso'/>
<target dev='hdc' bus='sata'/>
</disk>
<interface type='bridge'>
<model type='virtio'/>
<source bridge="virbr0"/>
</interface>
</devices>
</domain>
Guest console connection is supported through the nmdm device. It could be enabled by adding
the following to the domain XML (Since 1.2.4):
...
<devices>
<serial type="nmdm">
<source master="/dev/nmdm0A" slave="/dev/nmdm0B"/>
</serial>
</devices>
...
Make sure to load the nmdm kernel module if you plan to use that.
Then virsh console command can be used to connect to the text console
of a guest.
NB: Some versions of bhyve have a bug that prevents guests from booting
until the console is opened by a client. This bug was fixed in FreeBSD
r262884. If
an older version is used, one either has to open a console manually with virsh console
to let a guest boot or start a guest using:
start --console domname
The virsh domxml-to-native command can preview the actual
bhyve commands that will be executed for a given domain.
It outputs two lines, the first line is a bhyveload command and
the second is a bhyve command.
Please note that the virsh domxml-to-native doesn't do any
real actions other than printing the command, for example, it doesn't try to
find a proper TAP interface and create it, like what is done when starting
a domain; and always returns tap0 for the network interface. So
if you're going to run these commands manually, most likely you might want to
tweak them.
# virsh -c "bhyve:///system" domxml-to-native --format bhyve-argv --xml /path/to/bhyve.xml /usr/sbin/bhyveload -m 214 -d /home/user/vm1.img vm1 /usr/sbin/bhyve -c 2 -m 214 -A -I -H -P -s 0:0,hostbridge -s 3:0,virtio-net,tap0,mac=52:54:00:5d:74:e3 -s 2:0,virtio-blk,/home/user/vm1.img -s 1,lpc -l com1,/dev/nmdm0A vm1
It's possible to use ZFS volumes as disk devices since 1.2.8. An example of domain XML device entry for that will look like:
...
<disk type='volume' device='disk'>
<source pool='zfspool' volume='vol1'/>
<target dev='vdb' bus='virtio'/>
</disk>
...
Please refer to the Storage documentation for more details on storage management.