pmooney

> Could Oxide not have helped push multi-vcpu guests out the door by sponsoring one of the main developers working on it, or contributing to development?

Being that vmd's values are aligned with OpenBSD's (security above all else), it is probably not a good fit for what Oxide is trying to achieve. Last I looked at vmd (circa 2019), it was doing essentially all device emulation in userspace. While it makes total sense to keep as much logic as possible out of ring-0 (again, emphasis on security), doing so comes with some substantial performance costs. Heavily used devices, such as the APIC, will incur pretty significant overhead if the emulation requires round trips out to userspace on top of the cost of VM exits.

> I saw recently that AMD SEV (Secure Encrypted Virtualization) was added, which seems compelling for Oxide's AMD based platform. Has Oxide added support for that to their bhyve fork yet?

SEV complicates things like the ability to live-migrate guests between systems.

Improvements and fixes to illumos bhyve are almost entirely done in upstream illumos-gate, rather than the Oxide downstream.

Upstreaming those changes into FreeBSD bhyve is a more complicated situation, given that illumos has diverged from upstream over the years due to differing opinions about certain interfaces.

While illumos carries a port of bhyve which is largely similar to upstream FreeBSD, there are several areas where it diverges. Propolis (the userspace VMM component) relies on some of those differences to function, especially when it comes to live migration.