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[dupe] Xhyve hypervisor, a port of bhyve to OS X (github.com/mist64)
83 points by dmmalam on Aug 26, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments




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!).


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.


If you look at the TODO list in the README, several performance improvements aren't done yet. But it works fine for my purposes.

Recompiling FreeBSD 10-STABLE (make clean buildworld installworld buildkernel installkernel) in xhyve took 32 minutes on my 3.4 GHz quad-core i5.


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.


> 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.


You may find value in appcatalyst by VMWare. It's in tech preview, so it's still free.

http://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/vmware-appcatalyst/


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? :)


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.


That's not how early access testing works, especially with OSS software where they just put a release out...


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


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


Sounds like you had VirtualBox installed




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