Solved bhyve and a lack of verbosity

[StayFrosty]

Hi all,

I'm new to bhyve -- just started playing with it yesterday -- but I'm no stranger to virtualization or FreeBSD.

Anyway, after poring through man pages, tutorials, the handbook, etc. I was able to create a nifty test VM running FreeNAS using the vmrun.sh script. Nice! Now I'm looking to play with a few more options than the vmrun.sh script is giving me. I'm trying to run the VM with the bhyve loader directly and it's giving me this:

[root@Phong /VMs/images]# bhyve -c 4 -s 0,hostbridge -s 1,lpc -s 2,virtio-blk,./freenas.img -l com1,stdio -A -H -P -m 8G testvm
vm_open: Invalid argument

The path to my disk image is correct:

[root@Phong /VMs/images]# ls
freenas.img

Which means it's not liking one of my other arguments. I pretty much copy/pasted them from the example in the man page. Any advice? Does bhyve in FreeBSD 10.1 have different syntax than what is documented in the handbook? I know it's under heavy development.

Thanks!

 

[usdmatt]

I'm trying to run the VM with the bhyve loader directly

What exactly do you mean here? That you're trying to run the VM using bhyve instead of using the vmrun.sh script?

Are you aware that, at least for the foreseeable future, you need to load the kernel first with bhyveload, then run the VM using bhyve? It's currently a two step process.

See the following note in the bhyve(8) man page:

The guest operating system must have been loaded with bhyveload(4) or a
similar boot loader before bhyve(4) can be run.

I for one can't wait until they get the UEFI emulation working, allowing guest operating systems to be booted "normally", with the UEFI code finding and loading the kernel automatically (using CSM BIOS compatibility if required), then running it all in one step.

 

[StayFrosty]

Are you aware that, at least for the foreseeable future, you need to load the kernel first with bhyveload, then run the VM using bhyve? It's currently a two step process.

Nope, I missed that. Thanks. I guess I have more reading to do.