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by doublerabbit 958 days ago
It's not Linux. I have more than one gripe with Linux and FreeBSD free those. Yes Linux can do all those things but that's not the reason here.

The kernel feels solid and bHyve is a goddess.

Jails are great for running isolated browsers with sound.

2 comments

> bHyve is a goddess

Does it work well with graphics?

I just started using FreeBSD and one of the first thing I did was to follow the Handbook instructions to set up a minimal Debian in Bhyve that I then used to access my old Linux partitions to copy files. Works very well for that and I have no complaints, but I also can't say I noticed any major improvement over Qemu?

But I made a quick attempt to also install something with graphics, probably Lubuntu, and I did not get that to boot. Is the graphics good enough to play games and run some Linux-only applications with reasonable performance?

The hypervisor is not enterprise like VMware where you can easily pass 3D accelerated adapters. But it's still very usable over remote-desktop. Windows Server works a charm, as does Linux Desktops via VNC or whatever remote protocol you use.

You can pass though hardware devices including graphic cards but you need to have it as a secondary and unused. bHyve is unable to use the primary card as well as a shared device for the guest.

Yeah the thing is that bhyve doesn't seem to have an emulated console like the other virtualization solutions out there. That makes things a little more cumbersome.

I'm not even talking about 3D passthrough. Just a fake VGA adapter you can see in a window so you can run an installer.

It provides a graphical console over VNC: https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve/wiki/UEFI-Graphics-(VN...
Oh that's not too bad, I thought graphics always needed host OS network support. I'll try it, thanks!
The browsers in a jail is a lot of work to install and maintain though. I wish that was more of a click and go. Doesn't have to be easy mode of course but it could really do with a bit of automation.