bhyve supports the virtualization of several guest operating systems, including FreeBSD 9+,
OpenBSD,
NetBSD,
Linux,
illumos,
DragonFly and
Windows NT (
Windows Vista and later,
Windows Server 2008 and later). bhyve also supports
UEFI installations and
VirtIO emulated interfaces. Windows
virtual machines require
VirtIO drivers for a stable operation. Current development efforts aim at widening support for other
operating systems for the
x86-64 architecture. Support for
peripherals relies on basic and
VirtIO drivers and supports: eXtensible Host Controller Interface (
xHCI)
USB controllers, NVM Express (NVMe) controllers,
High Definition Audio Controllers, raw
framebuffer device attached to
VNC server (Video Output), and
AHCI/PCI Passthrough. Since the support for peripherals is incomplete, hardware-accelerated graphics is only available using PCI passthrough. But, Intel GVT (and other vGPUs with driver support) should allow sharing the device with the host. bhyve performs about the same as its competitors with lack of memory ballooning and accelerated graphics interface, but bhyve has a more modern codebase and uses fewer
resources. In the case of
FreeBSD the
resource management is more efficient.
FreeBSD is also known for its exemplary
I/O speeds; running bhyve from
FreeBSD has a lot of advantages for time-critical
virtual appliances by reducing I/O time, especially on disk and network related loads. == Applications ==