A fast development cycle makes a huge difference to productivity. For firmware and kernel development many areas can be efficiently tested inside virtual machines.
Traditionally physical test machines were used but virtualization lets you take the lab with you. This means working offline without giving up on testing.
In that past I used QEMU when working on the gPXE network bootloader. Now I am using KVM to test Linux kernel changes in less than 30 seconds and it's a really pleasant setup.
What can't be tested under KVM?
A lot of code can be tested in a virtual machine but device drivers or hardware-specific code often require physical machines. But with PCI device assignment, or passing physical PCI devices through into the virtual machine, it is becoming possible to test device drivers in a virtual machine too.
Testing kernels without disk images
Most virtual machines are booted from a disk image or an ISO file, but KVM can directly load a Linux kernel into memory skipping the bootloader. This means you don't need an image file containing the kernel and boot files. Instead, you can run a kernel directly like this:
qemu-kvm -kernel arch/x86/boot/bzImage -initrd initramfs.gz -append "console=ttyS0" -nographic
These flags directly load a kernel and initramfs from the host filesystem without the need to generate a disk image or configure a bootloader.
The optional -initrd flag loads an initramfs for the kernel to use as the root filesystem.
The -append flags adds kernel parameters and can be used to enable the serial console.
The -nographic option restricts the virtual machine to just a serial console and therefore keeps all test kernel output in your terminal rather than in a graphical window.
Building an initramfs
I don't use a distro initramfs generation utility because I like to control which files get included and the init script. Instead I use the linux-2.6/usr/gen_init_cio utility to build an initramfs cpio archive from a specification file. A neat feature of gen_init_cpio is that you don't need to be root in order to create device files or set ownership inside the initramfs. The specification file syntax looks like this:
# a comment file <name> <location> <mode> <uid> <gid> [<hard links>] dir <name> <mode> <uid> <gid> nod <name> <mode> <uid> <gid> <dev_type> <maj> <min> slink <name> <target> <mode> <uid> <gid> pipe <name> <mode> <uid> <gid> sock <name> <mode> <uid> <gid>
The kernel will execute the file at /init. I include busybox in the initramfs and have the following script:
#!/bin/sh mount -t proc none /proc mount -t sysfs none /sys mount -t configfs none /sys/kernel/config mount -t debugfs none /sys/kernel/debug mount -t tmpfs none /tmp # Test setup commands here: insmod /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/... exec /bin/sh -i
Instead of building out a full /lib/modules directory tree I just include those kernel module dependencies that I need. This means I use insmod(8) instead of modprobe(8) because I skip generating depmod(8) dependency metadata.
Tying it all together
Here are the steps I take to build and test a kernel:
cd linux-2.6 [...make some changes...] make usr/gen_init_cpio initramfs | gzip >initramfs.gz qemu-kvm -kernel arch/x86/boot/bzImage -initrd initramfs.gz -append "console=ttyS0" -nographic
It takes about 28 seconds to the shell prompt inside the virtual machine with ccache and a hot page cache on this laptop. This keeps development fun :)!
