bhyve (and jails) manageability workstream

• bhyve management PRD
• Desired bhyve features
• Desired jails features

There is a collection of desired features for bhyve.

As of 2023/11, priorities appear to be on

1. state management daemon: possibly including a kernel component; Jan B is working on a draft for this, but code is not ready to be shared
2. redesign of snapshot and restore functionality as precursor to live migration capability; Vitaly G is looking into options for redesign.

There is also some additional tooling to help construct better overall bhyve management tooling

• mk-epair.sh helper script for managing epairs (useful for vnet jails)

There is a mail thread about redesigning the snapshot file format and there have been numerous approaches to implementing live migration; the current consensus as of 2023/11 appears to be that a redesign of the snapshot file format is required first before moving into migration.

Unless file level issues are not fixed, adding migration functionality would only complicate the matter overall. As of 13.2, snapshot functionality is not enabled by default but requires activating an option in kernel configs, adding a make.conf option and then recompiling world and kernel.