Using Vservers for Debian development
I decieded to give a try at the famous Linunx Vserver project, with the idea to set up a couple of virtual boxes dedicated to test my packages.
For those who don’t know it, vserver comes with a kernel patch (the context patch) and a set of tools. The idea is to mix chroot for the filesystem, chbind for the ethernet interfaces and chcontext for the processes. You get then a virtual server that uses the real kernel, thus without any loss of performance.
As we can create a new vserver with debootstrap, it’s a charme to work with it. I now have one vserver for each Debian distribution and use them for testing my packages. That’s really better than using your desktop box and is cheaper than using real boxes.
Moreover it’s really perfect for testing upgrades, as you can imagine.
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