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⇱ libvirt 12.0 Released - Bhyve ARM64 Support & Other Improvements For The BSD Hypervisor - Phoronix


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libvirt 12.0 Released - Bhyve ARM64 Support & Other Improvements For The BSD Hypervisor

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 15 January 2026 at 06:24 AM EST. 5 Comments
Libvirt 12.0 released today as this open-source virtualization API for management across different virtualization technologies/hypervisors. With libvirt 12.0, improving Bhyve as the FreeBSD hypervisor was a big focus.

Libvirt 12.0 brings several new features for the Bhyve BSD hypervisor support. Most notable is now having initial ARM64 support to support booting ARM64 domains on ARM64 hosts. Libvirt 12.0 Bhyve support also includes SLIRP networking support and VirtIO-SCSI device support.

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Libvirt 12.0 on the QEMU side brings improvements/fixes to firmware selection, the networking code added a port for the DNS forwarder, and there are a variety of bug fixes. Among the fixes were for dealing with a QEMU problem with the start-up of VMs with more than 25 external snapshots that wound up being due to a json-c JSON library parsing issue. With the 25 limit overcome, they can now deal with chains up to 200 images deep.

More details on today's libvirt 12.0 release via libvirt.org.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.