Windows 11 dropping support for these very capable mini PCs means many of them are headed for the bin.
Naturally, we’re giving them a second life as a 3-node Sylve cluster running FreeBSD.
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hayzam
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@ricardo@mastodon.bsd.cafe Yeah..honestly documentation could be a lot better, and I wish I had more time to spend on that..but being mostly a 1-person project with a tight budget, it's pretty daunting to do both :(
And I wish more people from the community would step up to this, I've made it as easy as possible to contribute as well: https://github.com/AlchemillaHQ/Sylve/tree/master/docs/app-docs, all our docs are hosted on the same repo in simple markdown files that are really easy to edit,
Sylve 0.3.0 (pre-release on github) adds a lightweight PF-based firewall + a seriously capable WireGuard manager.
Set up a deployment today for a client with multiple VoIP endpoints behind CGNAT (providing them with public IPs), and a tiny FreeBSD box (<1GB RAM, 1 Shared vCPU) is handling all traffic flawlessly. It’s honestly the kind of setup you forget even exists.
Before Sylve, we were hand-managing WireGuard configs for setups like this... not something I'm going to miss!
Sylve is now in the FreeBSD ports tree!
You can install it with `pkg install sylve`, or build it from ports: `cd /usr/ports/sysutils/sylve && make install clean`
Really happy to see this land; thanks to @dch for all his help porting this! 🙌
So happy to see the new influx of users to https://sylve.io ! We are so, so back folks. 2026 is the year of vanilla FreeBSD in the homelab scene!
Feedback from a new Sylve user (from our discord) 👇🎉
Next Sylve release is shaping up to be a solid one!
We're utilizing the base WireGuard kernel module and PF to bring a richer networking experience, with support for traffic rules and NAT (SNAT, DNAT, BINAT).
I just realized an article one of our users wrote (and I reposted) https://iptechnics.com/blogs/from-proxmox-to-freebsd-and-sylve-in-our-office-lab, just hit the frontpage on hackernews!
@ricardo@mastodon.bsd.cafe We don't currently support importing existing VMs or jails from other managers, or even from users' own handwritten configurations. That was a conscious design decision. There are simply too many different ways to configure jails, and even VMs on FreeBSD have enough variations that supporting every possible layout would add a lot of complexity for relatively little benefit.
I could see an argument for importing from widely used platforms like Proxmox or VMware, but even that probably doesn't make much sense until bhyve reaches closer feature parity with them.
That said, you *can* import existing VM disks. If the guest is UEFI-based, it'll usually boot just fine because VMs have far fewer configuration knobs than jails.
P.S. If you're going to try Sylve, I'd recommend using the latest `tip` release from GitHub. The FreeBSD port is a little behind at the moment. I'll probably get around to updating it soon™
Replying to
I did some very basic testing of ZVOL vs raw disk performance on a single bhyve VM, and the results were pretty interesting.
Small but important note: the "raw disk" here was still a file on a ZFS dataset, so this may look very different on UFS or a genuinely different backing setup.
fio made the raw disk look slightly ahead: ZVOL did ~127 MiB/s / ~32.5k IOPS, while raw disk did ~144 MiB/s / ~36.9k IOPS.
But pgbench (postgres) told a very different story: ZVOL did ~1698 TPS at 9.3ms avg latency, while raw disk did ~423 TPS at 37.3ms avg latency.
npm install on the Sylve repo took roughly the same time on both media, down to the millisecond. I actually expected raw disk to be faster there since npm is random read/write heavy, but the ZVOL seems to be doing just fine.
Alpine VM shape: 4 vCPU, 4 GiB RAM, NVMe emulation, real NVMe underneath.
P.S: I did both the fio and pgbench tests 5 times and took the average, this was a brand new machine so no noisy neighbors/stuff running on the host either
Just took the new OnlyOffice image on daemonless.io for a test drive, it's pretty bad ass!
Podman works like a charm as well, can't believe how well integrated everything is.
Replying to
@landelare@mastodon.gamedev.place Most enterprises I’ve seen treat Microsoft’s support matrix like gospel, and assume the TPM/CPU checks mean the machines are suddenly useless.
In reality, a lot of it just feels like a convenient push to sell new hardware people don’t actually need.
Replying to
@flo@infosec.exchange The difference really is negligible at least anecdotally, like to the point where it's a rounding error I would say and this is after me testing probably 100s of VMs deployed on all kinds of systems
Also I'd be curious to read the blog you're mentioning and maybe run identical tests so we can find out if the latest versions have any difference to their conclusions
And I personally like the aesthetics of a ZFS volume (which is also why it's a default on Sylve), it's meant to be a block device rather than a file trying to masquerade as one, and by default we have tuned it for performance compared to proxmox, setting things like primary cache to metadata (which gave us 10-20% boost) etc.
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@passthejoe @grahamperrin@mastodon.bsd.cafe @FreeBSDFoundation@mastodon.social
Check out our website https://sylve.io, plenty of info there :)
Replying to
@ly2en@chaos.social That’s pretty intentional. Proxmox positions itself as a virtualization platform, even in the name "Proxmox VE" (Virtual Environment). Sylve is broader than that, we’re not just focused on VMs. We also lean into things like proper ZFS workflows, simple Samba shares, and we’re working toward built-in networking features like integrating a nice GUI for WireGuard (among other things).
Another reason we don’t push the "Proxmox alternative" label too hard yet is that we’re not at full feature parity. Features like VM snapshots (CPU/RAM) and host-to-host live migration aren’t there yet, mainly because the underlying bhyve codebase doesn’t support them. Once those land in a stable release, it’ll make more sense to draw that comparison.