BHyVe

gpatrick · Jan 25, 2013

Not sure if this is the correct place for this question, but over the weekend I'm going to be testing BHyVe on my Intel i3 server and there isn't much information available on BHyve.

Does anyone know the limit of the number of FreeBSD guests (since that is all that's supported at the moment) that can be installed and running on a FreeBSD (9.0-RELEASE or 10-Current) host?

vermaden · Jan 25, 2013

Did not heard about such limit, also, check this:
https://twitter.com/CallForTesting/status/294367726204489728

phoenix · Jan 26, 2013

You need Vt-x and Vt-d (aka hardware virt support) in the CPU and chipset. Last I checked, i5 and above were required. i3 doesn't include the virt support.

vermaden · Jan 26, 2013

phoenix said:
You need Vt-x and Vt-d (aka hardware virt support) in the CPU and chipset. Last I checked, i5 and above were required. i3 doesn't include the virt support.

The i3's do support VT-x but they lack VT-d (is it required for bhyve?).

The http://ark.intel.com site is best friend here for check.

phoenix · Jan 26, 2013

Interesting. When we were looking into new Win7 machines to run XPMode, an i3 wouldn't work, as it lacked Vt-x support. Guess things have changed.

wblock@ · Jan 26, 2013

There are different layers for virtualization, and bhyve runs at a lighter layer, somewhere between a jail and full VM. The BSDCan 2012 talk on it is online.

joel@ · Jan 27, 2013

gpatrick said:
Unfortunately I am unable to test BHyVe because my HP Intel i3 will not boot with FreeBSD installed. The installation succeeds, but upon boot it tries to PXE boot and then fails to find a bootable disk. I've tried FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE amd64, FreeBSD 10-current amd64, FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE amd64 and FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE i386 and the same results each time. I've also tried 3 different disks.

However, NetBSD 6.0 amd64, NetBSD 6.0.1 amd64, OpenBSD 5.2 amd64, and OpenIndiana 151a7 all install and subsequently boot without any problem.

Did you report this? current@freebsd.org is a good start.

vermaden · Jan 27, 2013

phoenix said:
Interesting. When we were looking into new Win7 machines to run XPMode, an i3 wouldn't work, as it lacked Vt-x support. Guess things have changed.

Maybe VT-x was disabled in BIOS or FIRMWARE.

wblock@ · Jan 28, 2013

So the problem has changed?

joel@ · Jan 28, 2013

gpatrick said:
The second reply listed directly above worked.

Did you send the kenv output to Nathan?

joel@ · Jan 29, 2013

Are you running latest CURRENT? If not, update.

If that doesn't solve the problem, try current@ again. bhyve is still a very young project and the developers are very interested in fixing bugs.