Goal

The goal of these scripts it to provide a fast, easy, and lightweight development environment for development and testing related to the Linux kernel.

Highlights

These scripts do the following

• Build a raw, minimal Arch Linux VM image (~1.8G) with no kernel, bootloader, or initrd
• Install some additional packages for development and X11 forwarding over SSH
• Automatically enable dhcp, ssh, and automatic login
• Run the VM using qemu with KVM full virtualization. The Linux kernel and headers are mounted from specified locations (in run_vm.py) on the host machine. This allows users to develop and/or build kernels on their host machine and quickly run them in a minimal VM.

Here's a quick video overview.

This repo also contains a Linux kernel config file; it may or may not meet your needs.

Prerequisites

This is not an exhaustive list. Some other basic packages are also required.

Arch

• qemu
• pacstrap

Fedora

• archlinux-keyring
• arch-install-scripts

Usage

This should be all you need to do:

• Run make_vm.py, this creates your raw Arch Linux VM image (arch_disk.vm, by default). This script also installs base userspace packages and minimal other packages into the image. The image is also configured (to start some services and login automatically, for example).
• Build a kernel (you can use the included Linux config from this repo) and make the kernel headers. Using kernel modules isn't supported yet (but should be the next feature).
• Run run_vm.py to run your VM
• Wham, you should be running a VM with your specified Linux kernel and headers. Use shutdown(8) when you're done. Changes on the guest will persist so consider making a pristine copy of your guest image.
• You can SSH to your VM using ssh -X root@localhost -p 1313 (1313 is the default host port that is forwarded to the VM).
• Going forward you just need to run run_vm.py to run your VM again.

Advanced make_vm.py usage

The --custom-setup and --extra-packages options can be used to customize your VM.

For example, if your VM requires proxy configuration to access the Internet, you may want to use something like the included example script custom_setup.sh.example to configure the proxy using --custom-setup.

If you want to install more packages to your VM, you can create a file with your list of packages (newline separated), and pass that file to --extra-packages.

See --help for other options.

TODO

• How to best support and automate using kernel modules? Maybe something like virtme?
• Consider using qcow2 (overlay?) and utilizing snapshots

CREDITS

Thanks to André Almeida for the underlying idea.