bhyve Using bhyve to run Kali

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dr_grid

Greeting! I am considering taking a class locally in Cyber Security. This class will make use of the Kali distribution. I see a good opportunity to explore bhyve here, and I am hoping to install bhyve on my 14.4-RELEASE system, and then install a Kali Linux distribution as the guest software on that VM. It's pretty much all new to me, so I would like to know if anyone has done this, and if you have any tips for a novice. Any help and suggestion would be really appreciated.

I have never used Kali, but I suspect that it makes use of a graphic environment. I don't mind a command line interface at all -- that is how I do most of my FreeBSD work. But if a remote graphics setup can be made, that's icing on the cake. Note: By "remote" I mean something like what I presently do for some work: I write VHDL code from time to time, and use ghdl to compile and gtkwave to view simulations. I view those simulations on my MacBook air by running a (Quartz) xterm window with a command line like: xterm -e ssh -X foo@bar gtkwave design.ghw design.gtkw. I don't know if that could be done with Kali, and if not, I can cope with the CLI.

I do the remote viewing on the Mac because my FreeBSD systems are "headless", and I don't often need graphics. I run gimp this same way and it gets the job done.

Any pointers or suggestions are welcome. Thank you.
 
Long time ago, I set a Kali VM under bhyve. It worked and it's likely to still work.

I advise you to use sysutils/vm-bhyve even if I don't use it myself. It's a good and efficent wrapper around bhyve that will easier your life.

Use UEFI booting and don't forget to set uefi_vars=yes in its config file. You connect to the VM with a vnc client.
 
Kali is just another distribution of Linux. It does have some tools to make your life easier (venom generator). Not sure if pwntools is installed there by default. I personally never used it, I stayed true to my favorite Linux distribution. But Kali does make sense if you are starting to learn, you'll easily google information you need. I guess AI will be able to assist you easier too.

I can't personally advise on bhyve, The setup you've described should work though, there's no reason why not.
If you hit a problem with bhyve you still have /accelerated/ option - VirtualBox (though you can't mix two on a same host, they both use vmm).
Personally I'd run Kali on osx with VMware or UTM (qemu).

As always the best way to start tinkering with it is to go through handbook.
 
dr_grid said:
I am hoping to install bhyve on my 14.4-RELEASE system
Click to expand...
No need to install it, it's included with the base OS.

Also highly recommend sysutils/vm-bhyve, it's a nice collection of wrapper scripts that make creating, configuring and running bhyve(8) VMs a breeze.

dr_grid said:
I have never used Kali, but I suspect that it makes use of a graphic environment.
Click to expand...
Enable EFI boot and graphics for the VM. Then you can use a VNC viewer to connect to the VM's graphical console. Other than that, ssh X-forwarding could certainly be a viable option. If Kali supports that, not sure what it uses for graphics (Wayland or X11?).
 
I had installed kali under bhyve in 2024. Yesterday I did "apt update; apt full-upgrade" and it upgraded to kali 2026.3 from 2024.2 & kernel from 6.16.8 to 7.0.12 painlessly. startx brought up Xorg and Xfce (in a vnc window).
 
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