vm-o-matic - Simple, semi-automatic QEMU recipes

vm-o-matic isn't clever, complete or scaleable. However it is useful if you want to spin up a throwaway VM to test out something about a specific distro.

Example

cd debian-11-bullseye-amd64
make help
make install
make

Kernel hacking

An defconfig kernel usually has enough compiled built in to do a minimal boot (an arm64 one certainly does). For some recipes we can bypass grub and load a kernel directly.

cd debian-11-bullseye-amd64
# Let's assume `make install` has already been run!
make KERNEL=/path/to/linux/source/arch/arm64/boot/Image

Note that recipes that don't support this out-of-the-box will give you a helpful error message and some clues on how to fix it!