Can Bhyve run a DOS VM

[Phishfry]

I need a DOS shell from time to time for firmware flashing tools.
Is it possible to create a FreeDOS VM on Bhyve?

 

[aragats]

Since bhyve(8) supports only UEFI, it's not possible.
For many purposes emulators/dosbox may be useful.

 

[Phishfry]

What about under sysutils/grub2-bhyve ? Would that do it?
http://hype-free.blogspot.com/2008/12/booting-freedos-with-grub.html

 

[Ordoban]

I think both options bhyve or dosbox would not work.
DOS and DOS-programs need BIOS functions to run. So even if you get DOS booted in bhyve with grub - it would not run.
Dosbox emulates every pice of hardware with raw CPU power. For firmware flashing tools you need access to the real hardware, but dosbox does not support passthrough.

 

[rootbert]

try to boot it via pxe?

 

[SirDice]

There's support for CSM UEFI boot. Never tried it but you might be able to CSM boot (Free)DOS. But getting it to boot is one thing. The old MS-DOS used BIOS calls for everything and those likely don't work any more on UEFI. I assume the same holds true for FreeDOS.

root@hosaka:~ # pkg which /usr/local/share/uefi-firmware/BHYVE_UEFI_CSM.fd
/usr/local/share/uefi-firmware/BHYVE_UEFI_CSM.fd was installed by package uefi-edk2-bhyve-csm-0.2,1

 

[_martin]

On FreeBSD the other option would be emulators/virtualbox-ose. It should allow pass-through device.
Even emulators/qemu might be worth checking out. I use it daily, DOS runs there just fine (and with qemu's debugging support it's actually nice way to debug stuff).