virtme-ng

virtme-ng is a tool that allows to easily and quickly recompile and test a Linux kernel, starting from the source code. It allows to recompile the kernel in few minutes (rather than hours), then the kernel is automatically started in a virtualized environment that is an exact copy-on-write copy of your live system, which means that any changes made to the virtualized environment do not affect the host system. In order to do this a minimal config is produced (with the bare minimum support to test the kernel inside qemu), then the selected kernel is automatically built and started inside qemu, using the filesystem of the host as a copy-on-write snapshot. This means that you can safely destroy the entire filesystem, crash the kernel, etc. without affecting the host. Kernels produced with virtme-ng are lacking lots of features, in order to reduce the build time to the minimum and still provide you a usable kernel capable of running your tests and experiments. virtme-ng is based on virtme, written by Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>.

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