Linux Kernel Development Diary 1

MAC0470 Discipline

The posts under the category “linux-kernel” will, probably all, refer to the MAC0470 discipline of 2026-1 (IME-USP).
This discipline comprises contributing to FLOSS software, including the Linux Kernel.
The students are expected to write diaries to tell their experiences with the tutorials provided by FLUSP online, explaining step by step how to set up a suitable development environment, norms and sending patches.
This post is about the first tutorial, named “Setting up a test environment for Linux Kernel Dev using QEMU and libvirt”.

The tutorial

In this tutorial, we made the basics for starting a VM from an distro image (in my case, a Debian image).
More specifically, we created a virtual environment to run the commands, storing all the files under a new directory under /home.

After organizing the files and mounting the VM’s filesystem, we could start the VM and run commands on it seamlessly using the libraries mentioned in the title, also using virsh to manage the VM.
There was no significant difficulty following this tutorial.