— bhyve hypervisor kernel improvements
— desktop usability
— developer tools such as LLD
— hardware support on new ARM and RISC-V devices
— installer
— jails – usability/orchestration/OCI-compatibility
— networking
— packaging – including package base (pkgbase)
— …
It is nice to be able to move a VM from #FreeBSD to :omnios: #Omnios in a snap using the network just because they both ship with #ZFS and #bhyve. It nearly feels like vMotion.
It's been an incredibly intense week, and it's only Wednesday. This morning, I had to drive 200 km through icy fog and heavy traffic. However, this afternoon was dedicated to setting up a FreeBSD server.
The client wanted to retain some of the features from their old Linux system. I came up with the idea of directly passing the two physical disks to bhyve and booting them. The boot was immediate, and there were no issues. The new FreeBSD server was up and running, and the 'old' Linux was now operating as a VM, working perfectly on the physical disks.
The client was pleased with the outcome and asked me to set up a native FreeBSD desktop, encrypted because they will store important data. I hadn't installed a FreeBSD desktop recently, but it turned out to be easier than expected (no wifi involved).
I installed xorg, the Nvidia drivers, nvidia-xconfig (which generated the configuration file perfectly), kde5, sddm, Firefox, LibreOffice, the Nextcloud client, and made a few small adjustments to get the keyboard audio buttons working. Even suspend/resume functionality worked flawlessly, which amazed the client.
I then created a jail on the server and set up zfs-autobackup to back up the client's PC on the server (of course, on an encrypted dataset). Time to go home, satisfied with the outcome.
Today, not a blog post on my personal page rather than the company one. It’s nothing special and should just provide a short high level view for externals of #bhyve on #FreeBSD (#BSD in general) with #BVCP (#bhyvewebadmin)) as an easy to use and user friendly control panel. Alternatives to #Proxmox on #Linux are still present and more important than ever. You can find it here:
Tomorrow morning, I'll need to migrate an Alpine Linux-based VPS from a physical host (Proxmox) to another one running FreeBSD.
My first instinct was to go with bhyve, but I'm considering a less conventional and perhaps more efficient approach. 😉
I began 2024 with demo showcasing a Kubernetes control plane on FreeBSD, along with Linux Worker Nodes in bhyve and the Cilium CNI to enable the data plane communication.
I've now written an article to describe the steps taken.
In some spare time today, I created a bhyve VM with an OpenBSD environment. It is functioning as a (second) standby replicated router/firewall for my home network. Now, I have three of them: one is a Qotom i7 (running many other services), another is an old Atom (used for performing ZFS replications of the Qotom), and a Banana Pro (running OpenBSD on bare metal, in read-only mode, as stable as a rock). My home network is now quite redundant 🙂
Woke up this morning #BSD curious. For all the users out there, is there a reason for someone running Linux desktop to consider running #BSDDesktop (of any kind or flavor), or is it more useful to have as a tool for servers? My only previous experience with BSD is brief dalliances with TrueNAS.