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Comment by ulzeraj | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK it’s not a port of bhyve but a Port of the bhyve userland tools that tap into the MacOS hypervisor framework.

I wish there was a simpler approach to the hypervisor framework. I normally avoid using any third party software that wants to taint the kernel and third party hypervisors fall into that category. There is parallels desktop lite which can be installed from the App Store but it’s extremely limited (and paywalled) for something that I suspect it’s just a pretty interface to the hypervisor framework.

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There was Veertu Desktop, which used Hypervisor.framework, but they have pivoted into CI for iOS. At some point it was open sourced, but it seems to have disappeared from their GitHub account. At least someone seems to have made a copy before:

https://github.com/tithomas1/vdhh

Thanks for the link, I was wondering what happened to veertu desktop. It was a neat project.

QEMU now has ‘hvf’ (hypervisor.framework) available in master as an accelerator, I think it was a summer of code project.

Wish I could use it, but the current implementation calls the xgetbv instruction which is not available on my Westemere EP processors.

All MacOS/QEMU needs is PCIE passthrough and you could have an amazing setup with thunderbolt accessories.

Was not aware of this! Thanks for sharing, this could be a great breakthrough for interfacing with hvf machines. xhyve is sorely missing an accessible management cli.

Mmmm eGPU + Passthrough would be sweet. Imagine gaming or using GPU heavy applications on a Windows VM with dedicated GPU and without the need for a separate set of monitor and input devices like Looking Glass does. https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass

> QEMU now has ‘hvf’ (hypervisor.framework) available in master as an accelerator, I think it was a summer of code project.

It was not a Summer of Code project, there was (is) a company called Veertu that did the work who sold a virtualization product for running Linux and Windows on macOS on the App Store. Because it used Hypervisor.framework, it could be sandboxed and could be on the Mac App Store.

Google forked Veertu's GitHub repo, adding a few bells and whistles for use in their Android emulator.

Finally, the work was merged upstream to QEMU.

Correct, xhyve is built on the macos hypervisor framework.

I've had good experiences with it running linux guests, it took a bit of tweaking to get networking setup, but other than that it's been solid.

>running linux guests

Can you point me to the resources you used? Thanks.

the xhyve repo came with a small Linux setup

time (git clone github.com/mist64/xhyve.git; cd xhyve; make; ./xhyverun.sh) w/ "sudo halt" pasted into the resulting shell: 14.85s

It's been a while, but this is the startup script I'm using:

https://gist.github.com/wiredfool/0e1aa099a29f562cdc3ba30c36...

The hard drive images are literally a qemu image for linux kvm that's been qemu-img converted to a raw format, then the kernel and initrd were extracted, and stored in the mac file system. This image was originally on my linux box for a while, before I needed to go mobile on the laptop with it.

How is IO performance compared to Vbox? I've seen some old benchmarks indicating that xhyve IO is like 4x slower..

I'm seeing about 15% slower raw speed than the bare drive, dd if=/dev/zero of=tmp bs=1M count=512 is giving me between 68 and 250 mb/sec on a 2013 MBA with a nearly full disk, where in the terminal I'm getting between 78mb/s and 290mb/s.

ymmv, of course.

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