Question: FreeNAS with PC monitor to VM

[diversity]

LS,

I know that FreeNAS is not designed to have a GUI. But I, as a noob, have made some critical design errors (or at the very minimum choices that pose challenges) while buying hardware (trying out: in my signature)

Is there anyway I can have FreeNAS 11.3.STABLE running on the bare metal and have a Bhyve VM connected to the GPU (in that very same bare metal) so that I can actually sit behind the bare metal and do regular work on it?

Kind regards

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

You would need video and USB passthrough which seemingly can be done with bhyve. The FreeNAS UI does not offer you a way to configure this, though.
You could try to create the VM in FreeNAS, leave Autostart set to off and then start bhyve with all the necessary parameters from the command line.

There's a FreeBSD forum discussion here (among others):

Bhyve GPU pass-through

I saw on Reddit via Twitter that a user has GPU passthrough working with Bhyve. So he is claiming that you can pass-through a Nvidia video card and assign it to an X Windows session using the nvidia-config application. You must add the video device to your VM's Xorg config beforehand...

forums.freebsd.org

This user has had some success with PCI NIC passthrough:

How to pass all traffic through to a VM

I've got a Security Onion VM running on my FreeNAS machine (I'll provide the specs if it helps) with 2 interfaces, one for management and one for monitoring. The VM's management interface is simply attached to the same NIC used for FreeNAS management, em0. I have another NIC, em1, that is...

www.ixsystems.com

You might want to search the net for "bhyve" and "passthrough".

Good luck,
Patrick

 

[diversity]

great, thx. i'll give it a go.