Write a kernel, boot it before lunch

The operating systems course used to start with a week of VirtualBox troubleshooting. Hyper-V conflicts, nested virtualization flags, a student whose laptop simply couldn't.

Now every student's container sits on the department's rented server with kvm: true. /dev/kvm is there, mode 0666, so QEMU runs as the student's own user. They compile their kernel in the terminal URL, boot it with qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm, and watch it panic in a window on the display URL. Fix, rebuild, boot again. Hardware-accelerated, on real metal, from a Chromebook.

The instructor's demo kernel lives in a snapshot. A student who breaks their toolchain copies from it and is back in two minutes.

No hypervisor shared with strangers: the department rents the hardware. The operating systems course finally runs on the operating system.

The operating systems course finally runs on the operating system.