On Tuesday, 8 June 2021 at 19:40:01 UTC, kinke wrote:
Thx for sharing! Interesting; I've recently worked on something similar, but on Linux hosts and using a kvm/qemu/libvirt stack for running CI jobs in Windows VMs.
Yeah, this is running on macOS instead because the Linux and the Windows runners on GitHub actions don't support nested virtualization. The Hypervisor framework is something similar to KVM. The VM images are actually created using QEMU (on Linux hosts), because Packer doesn't have any support for Xhyve. Packer will create a qcow2 VM image. At run time, the qcow2 image will be converted to the "raw" format, which is the only format that Xhyve supports. qcow2 is used up until runtime because it natively supports compression.
I do want to support other operating systems going forward, but unfortunately, it's only FreeBSD and OpenBSD that work in Xhyve. For other operating systems I will have to use QEMU. QEMU does support the Hypervisor framework as an accelerator, but I don't think it will be as fast as Xhyve.
When QEMU is supported, it will hopefully be trivial to add support for non-native architectures. I've already built the OpenBSD image for ARM64.
-- /Jacob Carlborg
