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CyberOptic
Asked: 2011-03-04 06:06:22 +0800 CST

FreeBSD Hypervisor?

  • 772

is there any possibility to have FreeBSD running virtual guests (Linux and Windows) apart from VirtualBox? Didn't find any recent information yet.

virtualization freebsd

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Since the 10.0 Release, FreeBSD ships its own Hypervisor: bhyve. Its possible to emulate BSD and Linux Guests, with Windows-support on the way.

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  2. If you're looking for something to start running with right away, voretaq7's answer is the way to go. If you're looking to help with a more FreeBSD-specific project, there is a newer BSD hypervisor project called BHyVe.

    The FreeBSD wiki page has links to the freebsd-virtualization mailing list (where project coordination is taking place), a PDF from the 2011 DevSummit presentation, and a Subversion link. It appears to currently require VT-x.

    It looks like NetApp is sponsoring it and/or providing development resources, so it looks interesting. They are also looking for testers.

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  3. To my knowledge the hypervisor options for FreeBSD systems are:

    • Jails
      (For running FreeBSD on FreeBSD -- Not really a hypervisor, but similar)
    • QEMU
      (For running generic stuff on FreeBSD -- Performance is mediocre)
    • VirtualBox
      (For running generic stuff on FreeBSD -- Performance and features are better than QEMU)

    My suggestion out of the lot would be VirtualBox. You can also look in ports/emulators for other stuff I may have missed...

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  4. I believe Xen was ported at some point but wasn't kept up. There seems to be activity now for both dom0 and domU Xen support in FreeBSD but it isn't clear how far the dom0 support is. I think the domU support is more active and someone is working on it now for Amazon's EC2 specifically.

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