chyves is a bhyve command line front end manager, making it simple to manage guest resources and properties.

The goal of this project is to provide a bhyve front end tool that is easy to use, develop for, and debug. chyves is developed for an out of the box experience suited for the freshest of bhyve users. However bhyve veterans will find just as much utility with features such as true ZFS clones, PCI passthrough, rapid deployment, disk images, and snapshot reverted states on boot/reboot. Many features are targeted for large VM fleets where multiple or all guests can be specified, such as chyves gst1,gst2,gst3 start, chyves all stop, and chyves GoldMasterVM clone devel,production01,production02.

chyves utilizes FreeBSD’s bhyve hypervisor to start and manage type 2 virtualized guests and their resources. bhyve's primary interface to guests is through a serial interface. However with the release of FreeBSD version 11 came UEFI GOP support. This allows for a VNC console to be used to manage UEFI guests.

This project has two branches it uses: master and dev. The ingress branch for all PRs and development is the dev branch. After a chunk of code has been tested in dev, it gets merge back into master. See DEVELOPMENT.md for details.

chyves is primary developed on FreeBSD 12-CURRENT and further tested on 11.0-STABLE. Most features should work on 10.3-STABLE as chyves was initially developed on 10.3 but some features are not available such as UEFI GOP.

For the 'show-me' types, watch terminal play back of most features on chyves.org under the demo section.

See the following documents for more information:

• BUG-REPORTS.md - How to report issues and get them resolved.
• CHANGELOG.md - See a summarized list of changes to this project.
• CREDITS.md - See who has contributed to this project.
• DEVELOPMENT.md - Coding practices for chyves.
• LICENSE - BSD 2-Clause License notice.
• Makefile - Used to install chyves from GitHub source.
• MAN PAGE - man page in html format.
• README.md - This document.
• TODO.md - Project goals.
• UPGRADING.md - Reference for needed changes from version to version
• USAGE.md - Brief crash-course on how-to use chyves.