Building and Booting a Custom Kernel in QEMU with virtme-ng
Testing a kernel you just built normally means installing it on a machine and rebooting, which is slow and risks breaking the computer you are working on. virtme-ng instead boots your freshly built kernel inside a virtual machine in about a second, using your own filesystem directly rather than a prepared disk image. You land in a shell on the new kernel with your files already there. That turns kernel work from a reboot cycle into an edit-and-run cycle like any other program.
Questions this Concept answers
- Why do kernel developers prefer booting a freshly built kernel in a virtual machine over installing it?
Speeding Up Linux Kernel Development with virtme-ng
Kernel development testing can be sped up by using an ephemeral, virtualized snapshot of the host's live file system rather than deploying to bare metal or maintaining a persistent virtual machine: t…