PTptx·Nov 11, 2023
It provides a graphical console over VNC:
https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve/wiki/UEFI-Graphics-(VN...
In FreeBSD 14.0 has reached – RELEASEchurchers
vm-bhyve
Shell2017–2023
churchers / vm-bhyve
vm-bhyve
Shell based, minimal dependency bhyve manager
7Distinct people
7Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
878GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Shell based, minimal dependency bhyve manager
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
If you decide to give bhyve a whirl at some point, I highly recommend giving vm-bhyve[1] a try for managing the VMs. Makes lots of tasks much easier. [1]:…
stock_toaster used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-02-09 00:55:22 UTC to 2023-11-11 22:20:53 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesI've recently switched from Proxmox to bhyve while upgrading my dedicated box lease. I use it for prod mail&web and various lab work. Should have done it earlier, as I don't really need the things bhyve lacks (suspend, HA/clustering) for my use-cases.
# vm list
NAME DATASTORE LOADER CPU MEMORY VNC AUTO STATE
access default bhyveload 2 8G - No Stopped
cicd default bhyveload 2 6G - No Running (33065)
feeds default grub 2 4G - No Running (35227)
gate default bhyveload 2 4G - Yes [1] Running (21012)
k8s-master0 default grub 2 4G - Yes [4] Running (1543)
k8s-node0 default grub 6 64G - Yes [5] Running (9988)
mail default bh
Read the rest
yveload 3 8G - Yes [3] Running (87082)
ml default grub 4 24G - No Running (64236)
registry default bhyveload 2 2G - No Running (47712)
repos default bhyveload 2 2G - No Running (14767)
web default bhyveload 2 4G - Yes [2] Running (92365)
Other than that, I use bhyve on my laptop daily since around 2015-2016. It was somewhat painful at first. I had to bake a CD key into Windows ISO for headless install but now VNC support exists and it's easy to output any graphical installer via VNC.
bhyve doesn't offer API and has not the most user-friendly interface (vm-bhyve[1] for the rescue!) but overall, I couldn't be happier with its - typical for FreeBSD - set-and-forget stability.
[1] https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve
I compare Bhyve often with Docker or Podman. It is a hypervisor and virtual machine manager. Basically you link a ISO and run it. It can be any OS.
There are several ways to run Bhyve:
- CLI
- Libvert and virt-manager
- vm-bhyve
A vm-bhyve template can look like this:
loader="uefi"
graphics="yes"
xhci_mouse="yes"
cpu=2
cpu_sockets=1
cpu_cores=2
memory=4G
network0_type="virtio-net"
network0_switch="public"
disk0_type="nvme"
disk0_name="disk0.img"
disk1_type="ahci-cd"
disk1_dev="custom"
disk1_name="/path/to/disc.iso"
Sample config: https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve/blob/master/sample-tem...
I use Jails to run applications like Postgres, Redis, Python api in an isolated environment. Jails is native FreeBSD, but isolated.
In Podman vs. Docker: Comparing the two containerization toolsThis is hardly a production use case, but I've had a bare metal server at OVH for several years. It's currently running FreeBSD 13 with bhyve. I have about 4x VMs running on it, including OpenBSD and several different Linux flavors.
Things have just worked and I've really not had any issues with it in the years it's run. The VMs are stored on a mirrored zfs zpool with sparse volumes so they only take up space they actually need.
All that said, I find the bhyve config language and command line options to be pretty painful, so I've been only using it with this frontend: https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve
In Myths about FreeBSDPerhaps it would! But the userbase is definitely what finally got me into FreeBSD. The fact that hobbyists were contributing such excellent cli tools as `iocage` [0] and `vm-bhyve` [1] really is what got me over my fears.
[0] https://iocage.io/
[1] https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve
In FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)If you decide to give bhyve a whirl at some point, I highly recommend giving vm-bhyve[1] a try for managing the VMs. Makes lots of tasks much easier.
[1]: https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve
In Homelab: Intel NUC with the ESXi HypervisorAlso vm-bhyve, which I've been happily using since 2015. Also amazing, also dead simple.
https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve
It is nice that there are multiple wrappers around bhyve - competition is good, and it shows a healthy community.
In BSDploy – FreeBSD jail provisioning