Bhyve Notes

Hardware Changes and Linux

If the underlying hardware chagnes, Linux virtual machines may not boot. To solve this, select Rescue from the grub menu and rebuild initramfs for the latest installed kernel version

kv="4.18.0-425.19.2.el8_7.x86_64"
dracut -f /boot/initramfs-$kv.img $kv

Windows Eval

The easiest way to try Windows to download a development image from Microsoft. To enable Windows networking we will need the Windows VirtIO Drivers. Then convert the image

pkg install qemu-devel
qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw WinDev2404Eval-disk1.vmdk win11.img
fetch https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/stable-virtio/virtio-win.iso

name="win11"
vncport="5907"
bhyve -c 2 -m 8G -w -H \
      -s 0,hostbridge \
      -s 3,ahci-hd,/vm/$name.img \
      -s 4,ahci-cd,/vm/virtio-win.iso \
      -s 10,virtio-net,tap7,mac=00:0c:29:dc:df:79 \
      -s 29,fbuf,tcp=0.0.0.0:$vncport,w=800,h=600 \
      -s 30,xhci,tablet \
      -s 31,lpc \
      -l bootrom,/usr/local/share/uefi-firmware/BHYVE_UEFI.fd \
       $name

Perhaps the only feature that does not function is Windows Subsystem for Linux since this requires support for nested vitalization.