bhyve with Linux guest, how to safely handle updates?

[dweimer]

On 2016-01-26 8:13 pm, Sergey Manucharian wrote:
> Excerpts from dweimer's message from Tue 26-Jan-16 19:07:
>> 
>> Is there anything that normally needs to be done after a Linux kernel
>> update to refresh the grub2-bhyve setup?
> 
> The kernel update should not have any effect since grub-bhyve uses the
> virtual disk mapping file, which should point to your linux drive.
> 
> I'm using the following command:
> 
> $ sudo grub-bhyve -m /path/to/device.map -r hd0,msdos1 -M 1024M debian
> 
> where "device.map" contains the following:
> 
> (hd0) /dev/zvol/zroot/linuxdisk1
> (cd0) /stuff/vm/bhyve/debian/debian-testing-amd64-2015-11-30.iso
> 
> "hd0" can be a real disk device, e.g. /dev/sda, or an image file (in
> my case it's a ZFS volume).
> 
> How do you use that VM in VBox? If it's a .vdi file, bhyve will not be
> able to recognize it. You should use a raw HDD image file. To make it
> compatible with VBox you can create a .vmdk file pointing to that raw
> image.
> 
> --
> Sergey

I am back to testing again, copied my ZFS Boot Environment over to a 
VMware virtual machine, renamed it and changed IPs, removed the virtual 
box stuff, and enabled bhyve.

I did some searching and found out that I was using 
https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve to manage the bhyve virtual 
machines starting and stopping. Sticking with zvol for disk backing, I 
know its less portable.

I have been able to install a couple of debian virtual machines and play 
around with them. So far I have been unable to duplicate the issue I had 
before. My current issue which maybe related to running inside a VMware 
virtual machine. Is the Linux hwclock and system clock sync issues. If I 
power off the vm and reboot it it believes that the disk was modified in 
the future and appears to hang. Its actually doing a fsck I just don't 
see status if you wait long enough it finally does come up.

Has anyone else ran into this issue? I have actually ran the hwclock 
-systohc --utc prior to powering down and still had the issue. Tried 
changing the hwclock to system time by excluding the --utc from the 
command no change. Incidentally whether I use the --utc or not the 
hwclock --show always displays the local time. I couldn't seem to find 
any documentation on bhyve whether or not I should tell the guests that 
the hwclock is in utc or local time.

-- 
Thanks,
    Dean E. Weimer
    http://www.dweimer.net/