# NEWS: BHyVe - The BSD HyperVisor



## vermaden (Nov 13, 2011)

> Neel Natu and Peter Grehan unveiled BHyVe, the "BSD HyperVisor" for FreeBSD at BSDCan 2011 and kindly helped me get it up and running. I invite you to do the same and explore the many possibilities of this up and coming alternative to Linux KVM. Because BHyVe relies primarily on the Virtual Machine Manager vmm.ko kernel module, it should be portable to other BSD's and even other operating systems. BHyVe guest virtual machines run modified FreeBSD kernels at this time and there are many opportunities to remove this limitation. Be aware that BHyVe is under active development and should be considered experimental. That said, I am pleased to report that it has performed predictably in every test I have run to date.



SOURCE: http://callfortesting.org/bhyve/


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## tingo (Nov 16, 2011)

Interesting. Unfortunately, most of my machines have AMD cpus.


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## kyau (Nov 28, 2011)

I would love to test this but sadly I am in the same predicament as tingo, all of my newer machines are AMD CPUs, my only Intel machine is pretty old, sadly without VT-x. If this ever gets support for AMD-V I would definitely jump on board. Either way I will be following this closely, good stuff.


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## da1 (Dec 1, 2011)

Will definitely do some testing (Intel i7) over the week-end.


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## _martin (Dec 1, 2011)

interesting .. definitely worth checking/testing.


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## nORKy (Dec 3, 2011)

So, what is the future of Xen in FreeBSD?


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## vermaden (Dec 3, 2011)

@nORKy

Support only domU (PV instead of HVM)?


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## minimike (Dec 16, 2011)

When comes support for AMD CPU's?

kind regards
Darko


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## BlueCoder (Mar 5, 2013)

Can someone go over the point of it? I'm looking at a couple youtube videos right now and have yet to hear what its approach is, why it is different than what currently exists, and why it is needed.


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## SirDice (Mar 5, 2013)

It's a hypervisor and with it you should be able to run for example Windows as a guest system. Very much like what virtualbox does (for simplicity's sake) except BHyVe is integrated into the OS. Currently it only runs various FreeBSD guests but work is being done to run Linux and Windows.


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## BlueCoder (Mar 5, 2013)

So it's BSD licensed. That's all I can tell that it has going for it from my research for now. Doesn't really matter though for someone just using the software?

What makes its implementation better than QEMU/VirtualBox and Xen?

Seems like it's just a reimplementation of linux KVM but on FreeBSD. Does KVM have too many Linuxisms to reimplement on FreeBSD?


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## SirDice (Mar 5, 2013)

BlueCoder said:
			
		

> Seems like it's just a reimplementation of linux KVM but on FreeBSD. Does KVM have too many Linuxisms to reimplement on FreeBSD?


Yes.


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## vermaden (Mar 5, 2013)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Yes.



Illumos guys made it and ported KVM to Illumos (actually done by Joyent on SmartOS - http://smartos.org/ - and then backported to Illumos gate).

But that does not change the fact on Linuxisms.


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## SirDice (Mar 5, 2013)

vermaden said:
			
		

> But that does not change the fact on Linuxisms.


Besides that I think we're going to have problems with the GPL too.


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