Run Alpine Linux Via vm-bhyve On FreeBSD - 2023-07-11

The Issue

The sample template for alpine linux in the vm-bhyve project is using grub to boot the OS.

With this template I got the following error on every boot:

error: unknown filesystem.
error: you need to load the kernel first.

Solution Workaround

After moving from grub to uefi everything worked fine.

Additionally, I changed virtio-blk to nvme because multiple sources mentioned an enhancement in disk speed.

The template should look something like this:

loader="uefi"
cpu=1
memory=512M
network0_type="nvme"
network0_switch="public"
disk0_type="nvme"
disk0_name="disk0.img"

The changes in detail:

• replace loader="grub" with loader="uefi"
• remove all lines containing the word grub_
• replace disk0_type="virtio-blk" with disk0_type="nvme"

You will also need to install sysutils/bhyve-firmware if you haven’t done so already.