bhyve is FreeBSD's native hypervisor. The vmm.ko kernel module provides CPU and memory virtualization using VT-x or AMD-V, while a per-VM userspace bhyve process emulates the devices. The design is lean and modern, with a focus on virtio and a small set of emulated devices (AHCI storage, the e1000 NIC, USB, a framebuffer, and PCI passthrough). A guest-to-host escape therefore targets the device models in the bhyve process, landing on the FreeBSD host, and the usual disk-image theft applies to the guest's backing storage.
# on a FreeBSD bhyve host
kldstat | grep vmm; ls /dev/vmm/
ps aux | grep bhyve | grep -v grep
Subtopics#
- Guest-to-host escape: breaking out through bhyve device models.
- Host access and shell: execution on the FreeBSD host.
- Known escape exploits: the recurring device-model bugs.