bhyve:officehours:24march2021

Table of Contents

Agenda
Video
Meeting Notes

Agenda

Intro to bhyve office hours
Notable commits in the past month
Demos
- bhyve vs bare metal performance
- bhyve on ARM
Q & A

Video

YouTube video of TBP|bhyve Office Hours Meeting

Meeting Notes

Notable commits in the past month
- John Baldwin has committed improved configuration infrastructure.
- New committer Ka Ho Ng has joined the project and contributed to:
  - PCI 64-bit BAR pass through
  - VirtIO v1.0 device emulation
  - Fixing IOMMU support in AMD which will fix a lot of issues in the high-end AMD CPU lineup such as Threadripper and EPYC
- New committer Rob Wing has joined the project and contributed to:
  - Snapshot/restore code
Demos
- bhyve vs Bare Metal performance comparison
  - OpenSSL speed test (sha256, sha512)
  - ffmpeg file transcoding
- bhyve on ARM
  - ARM simulator(v8) on Ubuntu for comparison
  - ARM/bhyve on Espressobin
    - Overall, ARM/bhyve on native ARM hardware is 20 times (x20) more performant than the ARM simulator.
    - This is the hardware that Peter used in the demonstration but any ARM hardware that supports the XYZ CPU feature can be used.

Q & A
- What is the reason for not being able to run bhyve as a non-root user?
  - Take notes from recording.
- Comparisons against memory bandwidth
  - Problematic with all virtualisation. Double paging is effectively occuring in memory causing this to bottleneck.
- Usability for general users, how can we use bhyve easily?
  - vm-bhyve is the common way to stand up bhyve guests. A demonstration will be performed on the next bhyve office hours call on how to use vm-bhyve so all users can leverage the virtualisation platform.