"VIRTME" Revised For Virtualized Linux Kernel Testing

The "VIRTME" project was started years ago as a set of simple tools for running a virtualized Linux kernel that uses the host distribution or basic root file-system rather than a complete Linux distribution image. There hasn't been a new release of VIRTME in years but that changed on Thursday.

VIRTME is focused on providing a very basic virtualization setup for quickly and easily testing Linux kernel changes without the overhead of setting up a complete virtualization stack. Developers behind VIRTME also talked previously of spinning this into a sandbox-type environment.

Up until yesterday the last release of VIRTME was v0.0.1 back in 2014, but now that was succeeded by VIRTME v0.1 on Thursday (as well as a v0.1.1 due to a bug getting into that release).

VIRTME continues to be developed by Andy Lutomirski and other upstream kernel developers. In recent weeks development on it picked up with the addition of RISC-V support, various clean-ups, better kernel module handling, and a wide range of new options supported. Since v0.0.1 has also been POWERPC64 and SPARC64 support among other additions in recent years.

Those wanting to learn about the new and improved VIRTME can do so via its Kernel.org Git repository.