bhyve(4)

bhyve4

Virtual machine monitor

Usage

/usr/sbin/bhyve /usr/sbin/bhyveload /usr/sbin/bhyvectl /boot/kernel/vmm.ko

Overview

bhyve is a virtual machine monitor that is hosted by FreeBSD. It is used to host unmodified guest operating systems on top of FreeBSD.

bhyve relies heavily on hardware assist provided by the CPU and chipset to virtualize processor and memory resources.

Releases

30 releases since FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE; the text changed 16 times.

  1. 10.0
  2. 10.1
  3. 10.2
  4. 10.3
  5. 10.4
  6. 11.0
  7. 11.1
  8. 11.2
  9. 11.3
  10. 11.4
  11. 12.0
  12. 12.1
  13. 12.2
  14. 12.3
  15. 12.4
  16. 13.0–13.2
  17. 13.3–16.0

History

bhyve first appeared in FreeBSD 10.0, and was developed at NetApp Inc.

Authors

bhyve was developed by Peter Grehan ⟨[email protected]⟩ and Neel Natu ⟨[email protected]⟩ at NetApp Inc.

Bugs

bhyve is considered experimental in FreeBSD.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.