FreeBSD

Running FreeBSD guests is experimentally supported since Lima v2.1.

• FreeBSD 15
• FreeBSD 16 (CURRENT)

limactl start template:freebsd-15

limactl start template:experimental/freebsd-16

Prerequisites:

• QEMU
• xorriso (on non-macOS hosts)

Difference from Linux guests

• Several features are not implemented yet. See Caveats below.

Caveats

• No support for automatic port forwarding. Use ssh -L to manually set up port forwarding.
• No support for installing custom caCerts
• And more

FreeBSD prior to 15.1

• No support for mounting host directories. Use limactl cp or limactl shell --sync to share files with the host.

Plain mode

The guest agent, containerd, and automatic port forwarding are not available on FreeBSD guests regardless of the mode, so plain mode additionally disables only the host directory mounts (on FreeBSD 15.1 and later).