Webinar On Demand
Speeding Up Kernel Development With virtme-ng
Recorded October 2, 2024
Join us for an interactive, complimentary Mentorship Session exploring Speeding Up Kernel Development With virtme-ng with Andrea Righi, Principal Software Engineer, NVIDIA
A significant portion of kernel development time is usually dedicated to testing and debugging kernels, a process that can be frustratingly slow.
Unlike user-space applications, where a fast edit/compile/test cycle is common, kernel testing requires deploying a test system (either bare-metal or VM), installing the recompiled kernel, running tests, collecting results, and then repeating the process. Bugs can further delay this process, often requiring reboots or even system redeployments.
virtme-ng aims to provide a standardized way for kernel developers to expedite the edit/compile/test cycle. It leverages QEMU/KVM, virtiofs, and overlayfs to boot a recompiled kernel (or any kernel image) inside a virtualized copy-on-write (CoW) live snapshot of the current system.
This approach allows developers to simply "fork" their system with a new kernel, creating a secure sandbox for testing that offers performance close to native execution, without the need for dedicated testing systems.
In this webinar, we will demonstrate how to use virtme-ng for rapid kernel testing and debugging, with practical examples and common kernel development scenarios.
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Andrea Righi
Principal Software Engineer, NVIDIA
Speaker
Andrea Righi works as a Principal Software Engineer at NVIDIA. He is specialized in operating systems, virtualization solutions and performance analysis.
Andrea has contributed to many open-source projects, with a particular focus on the Linux kernel. He is the author and maintainer of virtme-ng (https://github.com/arighi/virtme-ng), an active developer of sched-ext.