Developing kernels and testing them in virtual machines

Question

I like programming challenges, and writing a kernel seems a programming challenge.

Unfortunately, kernels are particularly hard to test because they are basically th

Answer 1

Probably just setting up a machine (x86, I guess), and then investigate exactly how it behaves during boot. There should be one or more files in the host machine's file system that act as the virtual machine's file system, and then you'd need to put some boot sector information there that causes your in-development kernel to boot.

That would of course mean that the build system on the host has a way to write the kernel to the virtual machine's file system, which might vary in difficulty.

Picking one at random, bochs seems to support editing the boot media from the outside using standard tools like dd etc.