chyves has a lot of power, everything from: PCI passthrough devices; to running Windows guests; to using a VNC console with certain UEFI guests; to VALE network support; to rapidly managing 50 guests with a single command; to private networks; to assigning multiple NICs on a guest with separate bridges/vlans; to designing and managing that complex network design; to attaching 208 PCI devices to a guest; and much more.... but this document does not to go into detail about that.
This document only provides a quick start guide for setting up chyves and then basic guest management. Running chyves help will give you a quick overview of the commands and syntax, however the man page is the ultimate source of truth (just after the source, of course). Reading the man page is highly recommended to get maximum utilization out of chyves.
The chyves.org page has text based demonstrations of chyves using the text based terminal player, asciinema.
The recommended way to install chyves is from downloading the project zip from GitHub from your preferred branch. This will have the latest stable code from the project. chyves is based on the Bourne shell for execution. This means that when running make install a complier is not required and simply copies the files to their install locations with the correct permissions. To uninstall make deinstall will just as easily remove the same files and folders from the system.
Using this method, the project files are downloaded directly from GitHub. This is a slimmer method than using git clone because it lacks the development history of each file.
user@bhost:~ $ fetch https://github.com/chyves/chyves/archive/master.zip
user@bhost:~ $ unzip master.zip
user@bhost:~ $ cd chyves-master
root@bhost:/home/user/chyves-master # make install
This method provides the development history of all the files. This is the recommended method for developers.
user@bhost:~ $ git clone https://github.com/chyves/chyves.git
user@bhost:~ $ cd chyves
root@bhost:/home/user/chyves # make install
Lags slightly behind the newest code on GitHub.
user@bhost:~ $ portsnap fetch update
user@bhost:~ $ cd /usr/ports/sysutils/chyves # chyves-dev is also available
root@bhost:/usr/ports/sysutils/chyves # make install # No options to configure
Lags a little further behind, relying on code in ports.
root@bhost:~ # pkg update
root@bhost:~ # pkg install chyves
chyves is designed with future changes in mind. There are a couple of mechanisms that ensure the guests and furthermore the datasets have all the parameters and necessary structure to be compatible with the latest version of chyves. A guest and/or pool from the first version of chyves is designed to be upgradable to the current version using the chyves <guest> upgrade and chyves dataset <pool> upgrade commands.
See here for details.
chyves does require at least one ZFS pool. See DEPENDENCIES section in the man page for details.
To setup 'zroot' pool run:
chyves dataset zroot install
By default kernel modules are automatically loaded when trying to run a command that requires a loaded modules.
The most basic network configuration will require the following command:
chyves network bridge0 attach em0
Where "bridge0" is the bridge you want to associate the network interface "em0" with. See chyves list bridges for networking design.
If you want chyves to boot guests at startup set up the kernel modules and bridge0 every time you boot:
Add this line to /etc/rc.conf:
chyves_enable="YES"
Or use sysrc(8):
sysrc chyves_enable="YES"
Or run the following from the source directory:
make installrc