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I’m using xhyve as well, but I’m having trouble getting it to boot newer kernels. 4.4 era works, (16.04) but 18.04 and 20.04 have various failures. I note that docker is built on xhyve and doesn’t seem to have this issue. So it’s not fundamental, but the fix hasn’t made it back to thx mostly abandoned xhyve.

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Docker is using hyperkit [1], an xhyve fork that's still actively developed.

[1] https://github.com/moby/hyperkit

Ubuntu 18.04 (Linux 4.15) in xhyve works fine for me. I tried to get 20.04 set up a while ago but I gave up because its installer kept flaking out on me, something about the disk if I remember correctly.

Thanks to another commenter I found https://github.com/evansm7/vftool/issues/2#issuecomment-7354... which is exactly what I needed for Ubuntu 20.04: the idea to use cloud images which bypasses the silly installer.

If you just want to run a recent Ubuntu VM, you can use https://multipass.run/ from Canonical. (It uses hyperkit rather than xhyve as the hypervisor.)

I finally wound up with multi pass, but on the Mac it’s limited to ubuntu images, and I occasionally need to spin up arbitrary distros for testing things.

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