Running Windows under FreeBSD's bhyve | Hacker News Reader

Running Windows under FreeBSD's bhyve

pr1ntf.xyz

100 pointsvezzy-fnord12 comments

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The current BSD Now episode[1] has thoughts on this and the passing of @creepingfur[2][3] (Benjamin Perrault).

1) http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_12_16-im_talking_about_th...

2) https://twitter.com/michaeldexter/status/676290499389485057

3) http://pastebin.com/4BQ5uVsT

I'm certainly no expert on XML, but it looks like there's a good chunk of the Win2k8-AutoUnattend.xml file missing.

Unfortunately, at the present moment, that's probably the part of this that I'm most interested in.

ETA: Found the original XML file [0].

[0]: https://github.com/pr1ntf/YetAnotherBhyveScript/blob/master/...

Poor guest support is why I ended up switching from FreeBSD to Linux for my test server.

I'd like to go back, but I can't justify a single box for a single instance - I run lots of VMs, using all operating systems.

So I'm glad to see this, and I hope they continue the improvements.

I know very little about FreeBDS and bhyve. But, is it possible to pass direct access to the GPU to the virtual machine this way?

That way it would be possible to play the games in Windows or to use CUDA in a Linux guest inside bhyve.

bhyve would have to support what is called "PCI-E passthrough", and support such functionality via IOMMUs to allow device-initiated DMAs to work (which GPUs, >=10gbit NICs, storage controllers, etc, all require).

KVM, Xen, and ESXI all support this, so if bhyve doesn't support it yet, it most likely will in the future.

It should work for Intel's VT-d, but you're out of luck if you use AMD.

What? AMD has support for IOMMU.

The implementation is different to Intel's. AFAIK, bhyve has code to support one but not the other.

It seems the answer should be 'yes':

https://github.com/pr1ntf/iohyve/wiki/USB-3.0-PCI-Controller...

I don't have an answer to your question but note that bhyve is still very new, it is still very experimental, and the feature list is still pretty short. That said, work is ongoing and progressing pretty quickly.

You won't have much help from Nvidia, they like to disable this sort of thing when they can, artificial limits in their binary drivers etc.

Even though it looks like (and probably is, I can't easily try this right now) a lot of work, it's cool to see this running on bhyve

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