wiki/FreeBSD_VM.md

title, description, published, date, tags, editor, dateCreated

title	description	published	date	tags	editor	dateCreated
FreeBSD Virtual Machine	Tips and tricks for running a FreeBSD guest under KVM	true	2022-04-30T20:10:29.996Z	kvm, virt-manager, freebsd, virtualization	markdown	2022-04-30T19:57:51.313Z

Linux's KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) is great.

The FreeBSD operating system is also great.

You know what's great? running FreeBSD as a KVM guest!

Here are some insights into the process.

VM image or .ISO installation?

FreeBSD offers both premade virtual machine disks (in particular, we care about the .qcow2 image) and installation ISO's - a netinstall, a minimal install and a full installation.

Both have their uses:

The VM image is:

• Far quicker to set up - it expands to a disk and is ready to go.
• Kind of bothersome to expand - it's about 5GB and virt-manager does not offer a nice GUI for expanding the disk. Not impossible, but not friendly. (see resizing qcow2 article - maybe GParted can do this?)
• Uses UFS - great for simple stuff without the overhead of ZFS, not great if you want the bling and oomph of ZFS

The ISO's are:

• More similar to a physical install. If you need to do this for bare metal at some point, it's pretty much the same.
• Much more configurable - you can set the filesystem, swap, encryption, and hardening in the nice sysinstall TUI instead of manually later
• Slower to set up, obviously
• If using network setup (you should), you need to be absolutely certain the VM has network access (see Setting up a network bridge) or you're going to waste a lot of time.

Post install - system hangs at boot time

So appearantly, if you select the FreeBSD profile in virt-manager when installing the VM, KVM adds a serial device - which is both useless and throws BSD into a loop. This won't hamper the installatin - but you won't get to the login prompt afterwards.

If everything look OK but you're not getting to the login screen, remove the serial device from the VM's hardware.

Source: FreeBSD forums thread {.is-info}