NAME

bhyveload — load a FreeBSD guest inside a bhyve virtual machine

SYNOPSIS

bhyveload [-C] [-S] [-c cons-dev] [-d disk-path] [-e name=value] [-h host-path] [-l os-loader] [-m memsize[K|k|M|m|G|g|T|t]] vmname

DESCRIPTION

bhyveload is used to load a FreeBSD guest inside a bhyve(4) virtual machine.

bhyveload is based on loader(8) and will present an interface identical to the FreeBSD loader on the user's terminal. This behavior can be changed by specifying a different OS loader.

The virtual machine is identified as vmname and will be created if it does not already exist.

OPTIONS

The following options are available:

-c cons-dev

cons-dev is a tty(4) device to use for bhyveload terminal I/O.

The text string "stdio" is also accepted and selects the use of unbuffered standard I/O. This is the default value.

-d disk-path

The disk-path is the pathname of the guest's boot disk image.

-e name=value

Set the FreeBSD loader environment variable name to value.

The option may be used more than once to set more than one environment variable.

-h host-path

The host-path is the directory at the top of the guest's boot filesystem.

-l os-loader

Specify a different OS loader. By default bhyveload will use /boot/userboot.so, which presents a standard FreeBSD loader.

-m memsize[K|k|M|m|G|g|T|t]

memsize is the amount of memory allocated to the guest.

The memsize argument may be suffixed with one of K, M, G or T (either upper or lower case) to indicate a multiple of Kilobytes, Megabytes, Gigabytes or Terabytes respectively.

memsize defaults to 256M.

-C

Include guest memory in the core file when bhyveload dumps core. This is intended for debugging an OS loader as it allows inspection of the guest memory.

-S

Wire guest memory.

EXAMPLES

To create a virtual machine named freebsd-vm that boots off the ISO image /freebsd/release.iso and has 1GB memory allocated to it:

bhyveload -m 1G -d
  /freebsd/release.iso freebsd-vm

To create a virtual machine named test-vm with 256MB of memory allocated, the guest root filesystem under the host directory /user/images/test and terminal I/O sent to the nmdm(4) device /dev/nmdm1B

bhyveload -m 256MB -h
  /usr/images/test -c /dev/nmdm1B test-vm

HISTORY

bhyveload first appeared in FreeBSD 10.0, and was developed at NetApp Inc.

AUTHORS

bhyveload was developed by Neel Natu <neel@FreeBSD.org> at NetApp Inc with a lot of help from Doug Rabson <dfr@FreeBSD.org>.

BUGS

bhyveload can only load FreeBSD as a guest.