bhyve How do you share files into bhyve VMs?

[bakul]

In my measurements virtio-9p is about twice as fast as NFS but unlike NFS it doesn't cache. So once things are cached NFS is much faster.

 

[jmpalacios]

In my measurements virtio-9p is about twice as fast as NFS but unlike NFS it doesn't cache. So once things are cached NFS is much faster.

Would you be open to sharing your virtio-9p setup details and performance numbers?

 

[bakul]

I use plain bhyve and have something like the following args to bhyve command line:

-s 8,virtio-9p,src=/usr/src \
-s 9,virtio-9p,obj=/usr/obj \

Then in the freebsd guest /etc/fstab has entries like this:

src /usr/src p9fs rw 0 0
obj /usr/obj p9fs rw 0 0

As for performance, see this -hackers post: https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-hackers/2026-May/006363.html
The uncached numbers for nfs are *worse* than I remembered!
But warning: p9fs is used much less and tested much less so there may still be bugs.

Sharing is still much worse so I usually just copy files to the VM's filesystem.
I use nvme as virtual disk type, for example: " -s 5,nvme,disk.img \"

 

[weberjn]

Do the args also work with vm-bhyve ?

 

[jmpalacios]

I use plain bhyve and have something like the following args to bhyve command line:

Then in the freebsd guest /etc/fstab has entries like this:

As for performance, see this -hackers post: https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-hackers/2026-May/006363.html
The uncached numbers for nfs are *worse* than I remembered!
But warning: p9fs is used much less and tested much less so there may still be bugs.

Sharing is still much worse so I usually just copy files to the VM's filesystem.
I use nvme as virtual disk type, for example: " -s 5,nvme,disk.img \"

Thank you, most appreciated!