
Xhyve hypervisor, a port of bhyve to OS X - dmmalam
https://github.com/mist64/xhyve/
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ShinyCyril
Previous discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9690846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9690846).

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therealmarv
always upvote xhyve. But it needs a lot of work to be done IMHO. It is still
to complicated to get a normal Ubuntu Server up and running. Also networking
is too complicated. So it needs volunteers which can contribute something like
a VirtualBox GUI and also Vagrant support (would be so nice!).

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Osmium
Does anyone know how performance compares to e.g. VMware Fusion for (multi-
core) CPU-bound tasks? Are there any benchmarks yet?

I only need a very lightweight (command line) VM, but it needs to be as
performant as possible. It'd be nice to use something like Xhyve rather than
buying a Fusion license.

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wcchandler
What hardware are you running this on? You might be better off running
multiple VMs bound to a single core as opposed to a single VM tied to many
cores.

Since BSD is heavy on sandbox models I'm assuming that will also be true here
and they're not implementing a para-virtualized architecture. That being said,
the host kernel will have to wait for NOOP on __X __amount of cores in order
to permit the VM to run. You may also gain performance by disabling
hyperthreading. With HT your cores share resources for each thread. This is
great for small time stuff that may only ever need a fraction of time on the
bus or make only a couple of changes to the cache. But compute heavy actions
should have full access.

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Osmium
> What hardware are you running this on? You might be better off running
> multiple VMs bound to a single core as opposed to a single VM tied to many
> cores.

Just a quad-core i7. I offload anything that requires major processing power
to a cluster, but sometimes I just want to test things locally first and that
involves running heavily-parallelised software on Linux. I just don't even
know what order of magnitudes to expect with a VM like this; running at 0.8x
speed would be fine, running at 0.1x wouldn't. I'll just have to benchmark it
myself when I get the chance.

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aorth
Wow, this is coming along nicely. I have only tried the `make` and
`./xhyverun.sh` so far, but I was happy to see a GNU/Linux booting after that!
How do I shut the VM down though? :)

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xdanger
Tested this when it came out. Don't remember what I did, it wasn't anything
too complex yet, but I got my mac to kernel panic in 5mins. Haven't tried
since.

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teabee89
If you upgrade VirtualBox to 5.0+ it shouldn't kernel panic anymore

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therealmarv
Also no Kernel panic with 4.3.30 anymore. It was a bug in VirtualBox not Xhyve

