The State Of FreeBSD's Bhyve Virtualization

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 9 November 2013 at 03:56 AM EST. Add A Comment
BSD
This week in California was a one-day FreeBSD Vendor Summit and during the event was an update on the Bhyve virtualization hypervisor that is playing an important role in FreeBSD 10.0.

We've talked about Bhyve already several times in the past on Phoronix as it's a very interesting hypervisor and one of the new, original features to the forthcoming FreeBSD 10.

The PDF slides from the Bhyve update this week at the FreeBSD Vendor Summit can be found via the FreeBSD.org Wiki. Some of the key takeaways include:

- Linux x86_64 and OpenBSD 5.4 guest support in Bhyve.

- There's a 16 virtual CPU maximum limitation right now but as much RAM as needed can be devoted to guests.

- The FreeBSD hypervisor features support for VirtIO net/block, AHCI SATA/ATAPI interfaces, and serial PUC/LPC device support.

- Future operating systems to be supported for guests include Illumos and Microsoft Windows.

- Other future work includes AMD SVM 10.1 support, VT-d IOMMU integration, transitioning to UEFI support, suspend/resume/live-migration support, and loadable device models and back-ends.

FreeBSD Bhyve is not nearly as advanced as Linux KVM and the various proprietary virtualization solutions, but at least it's improving and is a new, original design.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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