NextBSD
August 15 2026 - Linux compat work, ARM64 ISO lands, and KMS drivers for virtualization (WIP) #409
Replies: 5 comments
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Kernel extensions for Bochs and VirtualBoxSVGA have landed and can be tested in these images:
If VirtualBox is used the display adapter will need to be changed from VMSVGA to VBOXSVGA to utilize the new kext. For Bochs virt-manager or standard QEMU/KVM for amd64 via CLI, otherwise UTM for macOS apple silicon systems can be used as shown here with emulated mode but the display type will need to be changed to bochs-display. My next target will be virtio-gpu KMS for amd64/arm64. I have a PR in progress to enable the arm64 helpers as a pre-req. |
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Finally fixed the cursor issue for virtio-gpu on arm64 that was the last part of porting a working KMS driver. Once the packages land NextBSD will even be able to run Wayland inside a UTM/QEMU guest. To the best of my knowledge no other BSD has been until to do this until NextBSD as no other solutions have provided working KMS drivers for Virtual Machines thus far. 
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Added a guide here for how to test the new ARM64 image + virtio-gpu KMS kext with macOS & UTM: https://github.com/nextbsd-redux/nextbsd/wiki/Apple-Silicon-Mac-(UTM)-Guide |
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A couple of weeks ago I worked on getting Linux compat modules baked in so that I could do something like
pkg install claude-codeand have linuxulator working out of box. It's also close to being able to load Linux AppImages (with no linux base via pkg at all, but more work to be done at a later time for that).I then took a few weeks off from there until yesterday I finally landed the working ARM64 IMG/ISO:
https://github.com/nextbsd-redux/nextbsd/releases/tag/continuous
Of course this doesn't cover all the various board images, those can come at a later time, but it's a start for virtualization as I want virtualization on Apple silicon to work better than any other BSD starting with UTM as a first target via QEMU and the native hypervisor working as a follow up stretch goal if it can be done. Some years ago I wrote a CLI tool with swift to debug apple hypervisor issues via serial console with FreeBSD https://github.com/pkgdemon/swift-vm-cli so this work is kind of finally being able to circle back to some of that.
So with that now I am working on an experiment to see if I can get the following working bolted on to drm-kmod via 6.12 LTS sources as kernel extensions:
If this lands it means that any of these GPU types will create /dev/dri/card0 where X and Wayland both just work for hypervisors with these GPU types. It will probably take me a while to iterate through this but it will be my main focus for a bit since it unlocks me being able to do more things in parallel from the both the Mac with UTM/QEMU but libvirt/KVM on AMD64, etc.
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