Bhyve driver

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.

Connections to the Bhyve driver

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)

Example guest domain XML configurations

Example config

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.

A limitation that is not obvious from this sample domain XML is that currently only a single network and a single disk device are supported for each domain (as PCI slot allocation code in libvirt bhyve driver is yet to be implemented).

<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>
      <interface type='bridge'>
        <model type='virtio'/>
        <source bridge="virbr0"/>
      </interface>
    </devices>
</domain>