quiz: tiny VMs for kernel development
Room A | Mon 20 Jan 3:45 p.m.–4:30 p.m.
Presented by
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Rob Norris
https://despairlabs.com/
> Rob is a professional systems programmer with a focus on OpenZFS, the original CoW filesystem that won't eat your data. He has over 25 years industry experience as a programmer, sysadmin and technical manager in hardware, operating systems, infrastructure software and email, with interests including embedded systems, programming languages, network services, graphics and games. While he likes making computers better at things they should be good at, he delights in making them do things that they really shouldn't, and then excitedly telling you the story of the ensuing disaster.
Rob Norris
https://despairlabs.com/
Abstract
At the start of 2023 I traded my 20-year career as a Linux sysadmin for a new life as a full time OpenZFS developer. Going great, thanks for asking!
Because fast iterative development sucks when you need to wait for a reboot after every kernel panic, I wrote quiz, a tool to make fast edit-compile-test cycles on kernel code possible. Under the hood it uses QEMU’s “microvm” profile and a custom kernel config to boot from cold into the OpenZFS test suite in a couple of seconds. Its great, and I use it hundreds of times a day.
This talk will show you quiz in action, describe how it's constructed, show how I use it to keep OpenZFS updated to the latest Linux kernel changes and hunt down bugs in obscure configurations, discuss future plans for updating it to support other operating systems and architectures. Most of all, this talk will show you how with low-level kernel hacking for any OS can be made as simple as hacking on any other program.
At the start of 2023 I traded my 20-year career as a Linux sysadmin for a new life as a full time OpenZFS developer. Going great, thanks for asking! Because fast iterative development sucks when you need to wait for a reboot after every kernel panic, I wrote quiz, a tool to make fast edit-compile-test cycles on kernel code possible. Under the hood it uses QEMU’s “microvm” profile and a custom kernel config to boot from cold into the OpenZFS test suite in a couple of seconds. Its great, and I use it hundreds of times a day. This talk will show you quiz in action, describe how it's constructed, show how I use it to keep OpenZFS updated to the latest Linux kernel changes and hunt down bugs in obscure configurations, discuss future plans for updating it to support other operating systems and architectures. Most of all, this talk will show you how with low-level kernel hacking for any OS can be made as simple as hacking on any other program.