Setting up the kernel development environment - Shell Aliases

This article describes how to define useful shell aliases for your kernel development environment.

Overview

Shell aliases can make the life of a developer easier. In kernel development this is even more important as a lot of the workflows are driven by the command line.

General Aliases

Generally aliases make the life easier when navigating the source tree.

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alias ..="cd .."
alias sb="source ~/.bash_profile"

alias io="cd ~/liburing"
alias lio="cd ~/liburing.upstream"

alias l="cd ~/linux"
alias lu="cd ~/linux.upstream"

alias r="cd ~/rocksdb"
alias s="cd ~/systemd"

I generally define aliases for the important directories. This makes navigating pretty quick. I work mostly on three repositories: linux upstream repo, linux company repo and io-uring. For each of them I have an alias defined. In addition I have an alias to switch to the parent directory.

Git Aliases

Some git commands are repeated pretty reguarly. I have defined aliases for some of them. I often need to see the current list of branches, create a patch for for the last commit, get a list of current commits and get the status of the current transaction.

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alias gb="git branch"
alias gf='git format-patch -1'
alias glo="git log --oneline"
alias gs="git status"

Editor Aliases

I also defined a few aliases to invoke emacs faster. One is for text mode emacs, the other is to open emacs in graphics mode. In addition there are shortcuts to update the doom emacs configuration and to invoke neovim.

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alias ds='~/.emacs.d/bin/doom sync'

alias e="emacs -nw"
alias et="emacs -nw"
alias ew="emacs"

alias n="nvim"

Email Aliases

To quickly fetch new emails, I have defined the mb alias.

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alias mb="mbsync -a"

Kernel Aliases

For kernel development I have defined a few additional aliases. mc invokes make clean and m starts a new parallel build. It takes into accout how many processors are available on the system.

In case you decided to use LSP (Language server protocol), the gen alias updates the LSP server. Especially after swithing branches this is necessary. If you use cscope instead, the cs alias invokes cscope.

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alias cpl="scripts/checkpatch.pl *.patch"
alias cs='cscope -k -d'
alias gen="scripts/clang-tools/gen_compile_commands.py"
alias m="make -j$(nproc)"
alias mc="make clean"

Virtualization Aliases

To make virtualization easier to use, a couple of aliases have been defined. The standard one is vt. vt starts a virtual kernel with 4 processors and 16MB of memory. vio starts a kernel that also makes a local liburing and fio directory available. This is very useful for running io-uring tests. vdbg is an alias that allows to attach a gdb session to the kernel during startup (I will write an additional post that describes how to do this). The last alias vnvme attaches a nvme device to the virtual machine.

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alias vt='virtme-run --kimg arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage --rwdir=/home/shr/linux.upstream   -a "nokaslr"  --qemu-opts -m 16384 -smp 4'
alias vio='virtme-run --kimg arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage --rwdir=/home/shr/liburing.master --rwdir=/home/shr/fio  -a "nokaslr"  --qemu-opts -m 16384 -smp 4 -qmp tcp:localhost:4444,server,nowait'
alias vdbg='virtme-run --kimg arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage --rwdir=/home/shr/liburing.master --rwdir=/home/shr/fio  -a "nokaslr"  --qemu-opts -m 16384 -smp 4 -qmp tcp:localhost:4444,server,nowait -s -S'
alias vnvme='virtme-run --kimg arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage --rwdir=/home/shr/liburing.master --rwdir=/home/shr/fio  -a "nokaslr"  --qemu-opts -m 16384 -smp 4 -drive file=/home/shr/nvme.img,format=raw,if=none,id=NVME1 -device nvme,drive=NVME1,serial=1234'