BHYVELOAD(8)            FreeBSD System Manager's Manual           BHYVELOAD(8)

NAME
     bhyveload - load a FreeBSD guest inside a bhyve virtual machine

SYNOPSIS
     bhyveload [-C] [-S] [-c cons-dev] [-d disk-path] [-e name=value]
               [-h host-path] [-l os-loader] [-m memsize[K|k|M|m|G|g|T|t]]
               vmname

DESCRIPTION
     bhyveload is used to load a FreeBSD guest inside a bhyve(4) virtual
     machine.

     bhyveload is based on loader(8) and will present an interface identical
     to the FreeBSD loader on the user's terminal.  This behavior can be
     changed by specifying a different OS loader.

     The virtual machine is identified as vmname and will be created if it
     does not already exist.

OPTIONS
     The following options are available:

     -c cons-dev
             cons-dev is a tty(4) device to use for bhyveload terminal I/O.

             The text string "stdio" is also accepted and selects the use of
             unbuffered standard I/O. This is the default value.

     -d disk-path
             The disk-path is the pathname of the guest's boot disk image.

     -e name=value
             Set the FreeBSD loader environment variable name to value.

             The option may be used more than once to set more than one
             environment variable.

     -h host-path
             The host-path is the directory at the top of the guest's boot
             filesystem.

     -l os-loader
             Specify a different OS loader.  By default bhyveload will use
             /boot/userboot.so, which presents a standard FreeBSD loader.

     -m memsize[K|k|M|m|G|g|T|t]
             memsize is the amount of memory allocated to the guest.

             The memsize argument may be suffixed with one of K, M, G or T
             (either upper or lower case) to indicate a multiple of Kilobytes,
             Megabytes, Gigabytes or Terabytes respectively.

             memsize defaults to 256M.

     -C      Include guest memory in the core file when bhyveload dumps core.
             This is intended for debugging an OS loader as it allows
             inspection of the guest memory.

     -S      Wire guest memory.

EXAMPLES
     To create a virtual machine named freebsd-vm that boots off the ISO image
     /freebsd/release.iso and has 1GB memory allocated to it:

           bhyveload -m 1G -d /freebsd/release.iso freebsd-vm

     To create a virtual machine named test-vm with 256MB of memory allocated,
     the guest root filesystem under the host directory /user/images/test and
     terminal I/O sent to the nmdm(4) device /dev/nmdm1B

           bhyveload -m 256MB -h /usr/images/test -c /dev/nmdm1B test-vm

SEE ALSO
     bhyve(4), nmdm(4), vmm(4), bhyve(8), loader(8)

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

AUTHORS
     bhyveload was developed by Neel Natu <neel@FreeBSD.org> at NetApp Inc
     with a lot of help from Doug Rabson <dfr@FreeBSD.org>.

BUGS
     bhyveload can only load FreeBSD as a guest.

FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6          June 24, 2016         FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6