hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3777.txt

Episode: 3777
Title: HPR3777: Running Haiku on Bhyve, the BSD Hypervisor
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3777/hpr3777.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:14:53

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,777 for Tuesday, the 24th of January, 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Running Haiku Unbive, the BSD hypervisor.
It is hosted by Claudio Miranda and is about nine minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Claudio talks about installing and running Haiku are one beta 4 unbive.
Hey everyone, this is Claudio Miranda, also known as Claudio M on the Fediverse and pretty
much everywhere else.
I want to record an episode for Hacker Public Radio because as Per Ken Fallon, HPR
is extremely low on shows.
So this is my contribution and I hope to record a few more to fill that gap.
And if you can't please do so because this podcast, this Hacker Public Radio only exists
as long as you decide to contribute to it.
So my contribution for today is my experience with running Haiku, the open source implementation
of the B operating system, aka BOS, on FreeBSD via B-Hive.
B-Hive, if you're not familiar with it, is the BSD hypervisor.
So it's like virtual box or KVM and Linux or VMware.
It's a system to allow you to run virtual machines and run operating systems on those
virtual machines.
So this is available in FreeBSD, if you look in the packages, in the package repository
for FreeBSD, you do a search for B-Hive, it should be in there.
It's also available in the Lumos and I'm not sure if it's available on any other operating
systems.
But yeah, I will be putting links to these applications to B-Hive and whatnot in the show notes.
So keep an eye out for that.
So what I use, you could use B-Hive straight out.
There's commands and everything.
If you do a man B-Hive, it should give you all the information you need on creating
a VM and running that VM and configuring it.
You can also find a lot of tutorials online.
But there is a tool, a management tool that I use called VMBHive and you'll also find
that in the FreeBSD repositories.
It's VM-Hive and B-Hive.
But the command itself is just VM.
So there's a few commands that are listed.
The link that I'm providing also gives a quick tutorial on how to set up a virtual machine
with B-Hive using VMBHive.
So the nice thing about it is that it builds up configuration files for you, has some presets
and stuff.
So if you want to do a Windows virtual machine, you can actually do that.
I actually did that here at work and it works pretty well.
I was able to image the virtual machine with our district image here and set it up as
a virtual system for testing server of sorts.
But anyway, I'm not going to talk about that.
I'm going to talk about HIKU.
Since I had actually gotten this running and was playing around with B-Hive, I've tried
to get HIKU running on a B-Hive virtual machine.
So I went ahead and I went through the installation and the installation seemed to go through pretty
well.
The way I set it up is that I had it booting as a UEFI system.
So I did, if I'm not mistaken, initially I did use the X8664 version and the installation
actually booted up fine, I was able to perform the install.
But I did notice that once the installation was done, it wouldn't boot.
So I would start searching on the internet and I did find a page that from the HIKU website
that shows you how to boot or how to perform an installation for UEFI.
What you basically have to do is copy over the UEFI boot folders and I think the keys
folders, there's a folder with keys in there.
But I'm jumping ahead of myself here a little bit.
That folder actually is available on the latest release of HIKU.
When I attempted this the first time I was using one of the nightlies that were available
after the R1 beta 3 came out.
Every time I tried the nightlies, it just did not work.
But I figured since the R1 beta 4 was released just recently, I'd give it a try again.
So I went ahead, performed the same installation process as if I'm installing onto a regular
machine or a hard drive and I partitioned everything as I needed to.
Moved over those UEFI files to the boot system and the way I did that actually was after
everything was done and installed.
I went ahead and booted again off of the installation image and mounted the virtual drive that I
installed HIKU on or actually not that one.
I mounted the UEFI partition that was created on that virtual drive and I copied those
UEFI boot folders, the UEFI folder and the keys folder over from the installer image
to the virtual drive, the partition on the virtual drive.
And once I did that, I was very happy to see that it would actually boot.
So I don't know if something changed within R1 beta 4 that allowed for this to happen,
but I know there's been some, it seems like there's been some work in that.
But yeah, I was able to get a system booted, HIKU system booted and I was able to install
everything and run some applications.
As a matter of fact, the little bit that I ran was kind of impressive considering web
positive, which is the BOS.
The HIKU web browser, the native web browser, based on net positive, which was available
on BOS, that one used to be very crashing and sometimes had issues with certain sites,
but this time around it loaded sites with minimal issues.
I think the only thing I noticed was when I loaded a mastodon, it was an issue that
happened to me before where the widgets for the buttons on the page were just these blank
boxes.
Now if you hovered over them, you would see a tool tip that would describe what it is and
it would still function, but it wasn't just visible, it wasn't the actual widget that
would show.
It was still persisting on web positive that was on R1 beta 4.
Otherwise I did load a couple of things, I said I figured let me load my work, my
trouble ticket page for work and everything and our district's web page and loaded that
just fine, did have any problems.
YouTube seemed to work fine, but since I don't, not using any audio on that, I couldn't
really test too much, but otherwise everything seemed to load fine.
I do plan on playing a little more with R1 beta 4 on some actual hardware.
I had been thinking of installing this version on my EPC 901, which is currently running
OpenBSD, but I have to see because I kind of don't want it to leave the OpenBSD installation,
so I may see about getting another SSD and putting that on there and then just kind of
swapping out as I feel like it.
But yeah, it was kind of cool.
If you are interested in running FreeBSD and want to play around with Beehive, go ahead
and find yourself, heck, you might even run FreeBSD in a virtual box and then play around
with Beehive that way and then kind of go all inception with your virtual machines and
installations.
So yeah, I'll be putting the links in the show notes for all of this.
If you have any questions, please reach out to me.
You can find me on Macedon as ClaudioM at BSD.network.
You can also hit me up via email at ClaudioM at SDF.org and or just right in the comments.
Be sure to put a comment for this episode.
Thanks and have a good one.
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