Just sharing some first impressions and testing of this work: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2025Projects/VMMAcceleratorSupportForQEMU
As far as I understand, the work is nearing completion and the more people test it, the more chances there are to get it into the upstream.
If my memory serves me right, accelerated QEMU (via KVM) was around during the FreeBSD 4x era, but the development focused entirely on Linux.
Abhinav Chavali has already fixed a few bugs for me in the last few days and now I get working guest systems (there is some problem with starting VM with two or more cpus, fixes should be coming soon)
Also CBSD has been supporting QEMU for several years now, so CBSD users get it almost transparently (cloud images also work), can work together with `bhyve` VM (but we get more emulation - for example we can use SeaBIOS (run MSDOS, ReactOS), USB-redirection, QCOW2 and so on..)
I assume that virt-manager users also receive acceleration almost automatically.
I also assume that this will play a significant role for this project: https://github.com/openstack-on-freebsd/docs
PS: and this is one of the few GSoC projects in the last few years that has a chance of being completed with benefit for the FreeBSD users/project.
PPS: as far as i understand, we still don't receive KSM (VM guest memory deduplication, compression), Nested-VTx, memory ballooning and so on.. because these things need to be implemented at the vmm.ko level (KVM)
As far as I understand, the work is nearing completion and the more people test it, the more chances there are to get it into the upstream.
If my memory serves me right, accelerated QEMU (via KVM) was around during the FreeBSD 4x era, but the development focused entirely on Linux.
Abhinav Chavali has already fixed a few bugs for me in the last few days and now I get working guest systems (there is some problem with starting VM with two or more cpus, fixes should be coming soon)
Also CBSD has been supporting QEMU for several years now, so CBSD users get it almost transparently (cloud images also work), can work together with `bhyve` VM (but we get more emulation - for example we can use SeaBIOS (run MSDOS, ReactOS), USB-redirection, QCOW2 and so on..)
I assume that virt-manager users also receive acceleration almost automatically.
I also assume that this will play a significant role for this project: https://github.com/openstack-on-freebsd/docs
PS: and this is one of the few GSoC projects in the last few years that has a chance of being completed with benefit for the FreeBSD users/project.
PPS: as far as i understand, we still don't receive KSM (VM guest memory deduplication, compression), Nested-VTx, memory ballooning and so on.. because these things need to be implemented at the vmm.ko level (KVM)