Dev VMs

Install build deps. In fedora silverblue, enter a toolbox first.

toolbox enter # only on silverblue

sudo dnf install -y qemu-img qemu-kvm
sudo dnf install -y gcc pkg-config ncurses-devel flex bison elfutils-libelf-devel openssl-devel dwarves kmod cpio

To be able to ssh to the vm, make sure you have an ssh key set up. use ssh-keygen to create a new one. Packer will try to use ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub by default. use local_ssh_public_key packer variable to customize that. If the file does not exist, you can still ssh to the vm with user/password ubuntu/ubuntu (see user-data file as to how the password is set).

Build VM

# build a ubuntu images with tools.
packer build ubuntu.pkr.hcl

Linux Kernel

We expect linux to be present in a folder called linux. you can get it there for example with git clone https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git

Build linux. if make ask questions, just press enter. If tweaking config, for easy debugging build things into kernel and not as modules.

cp config ./linux/.config
make -C linux
# add linux gdb scripts
mkdir -p ~/.config/gdb/
echo "add-auto-load-safe-path $PWD/linux/scripts/gdb/vmlinux-gdb.py" >> ~/.config/gdb/gdbinit

To be able to revert, build a diff qemu image. to revert just run this command again

qemu-img create -F qcow2 -b output/ubuntu-2204/ubuntu-2204.qcow2 -f qcow2 img.qcow2

Run the vm with built kernel

Start the VM. it will not do anything until you connect a debugger to it and hit "continue".

Explanation of args:

• kernel - the kernel that qemu loads. this means that the kernel in the image is ignored, and the kernel headers will not be present, nor can you get them with "apt-get". If config from this repo is used, kernel headers will be available in /proc
• serial - output serial consul to stdin/stdout. you can use this to login without ssh
• drive - the disk to use
• net - create a network interface so we have internet access
• m - memory
• nographic - don't open a window
• append - Arguments to the kernel. important to have nokaslr there for debugging to work. We also add net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0 to have the network interface be eth0 as this is how it is configured in the user-data file.
• virtfs - make the current directory available to the guest
• -s start gdb stub
• -S wait until gdb connects

qemu-kvm \
  -kernel ./linux/arch/x86/boot/bzImage \
  -serial mon:stdio \
  -drive file=file=img.qcow2,if=virtio,cache=writeback,discard=ignore,format=qcow2 \
  -net nic -net user,hostfwd=tcp::10022-:22 \
  -m 8192 -nographic \
  -append "root=/dev/vda2 ro rdinit=/sbin/init net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0 console=ttyS0 nokaslr" \
  -virtfs local,path=$PWD,mount_tag=host0,security_model=mapped,id=host0 \
  -s

bpftool is in /usr/lib/linux-tools/<ORIGINAL_KERNEL_VERSION>/bpftool (for example /usr/lib/linux-tools/5.4.0-128-generic/bpftool). Note that because we are using a custom built kernel, just running bpftool will return an error.

debug with gdb ./linux/vmlinux -ex "target remote localhost:1234". Or with vscode you can ln -s ../launch.json ./.vscode/launch.json and hit debug.

Ssh into the VM with:

ssh -p 10022 debian@localhost

Though if you are testing networking, ssh-ing in might add noise.

For easy ssh, add this to your ~/.ssh/config file. then ssh debug-linux should work.

Host debug-linux
    HostName localhost
    User ubuntu
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
    Port 10022

Sources

https://superuser.com/questions/628169/how-to-share-a-directory-with-the-host-without-networking-in-qemu