Today I wanted to resize the root partition and backing storage of a SLE12-SP3
VM I use for debugging. This included quite some Google research and thus I
thought I’ll write down the steps I took for reference and others.
Here’s a small How-to for testing kernel changes with Qemu but without the
need of a rootfs. Instead of going down the disk image plus installation path
I just quickly fired up dracut
to build an initramfs suitable for my tests.
Recently I wanted to test the scsi_remove_device() and __scsi_remove_device() paths in the Linux kernel so I thought “What about using qemu’s hotplug feature to plug and unplug USB disks.
In order to test some specific features of the Linux kernel, I try to use
virtual machines as much as possible. This has a lot of advantages with the most
prominent being able to take your test environment with you when travelling.
Often you don’t have access to your lab or the VPN connection to the lab is
just not reliable enough.
Recently we had a report for an interesting problem in the Linux kernel’s
SCSI subsystem, which was fixed in recent kernels but older kernels lacked the
fix so we needed to identify the fix and then back-port it to the stable kernels
the distributions and thus ultimately the users used.