OSS + ELC EU 2026

You maintain a kernel fork. Maybe it's an LTS branch, a distro kernel, or an embedded platform. You push a patch and wonder, will it boot? Will it break something that worked yesterday? Most CI solutions either need a full test lab you can't afford, or give you a virtme smoke test that won't catch real failures.

We faced the same problem. 5 engineers, multiple kernels, no test lab budget. So we built a kernel CI pipeline that does real boot, real tests using nothing but GitHub Actions.
The key difference from other CIs is that we don't use virtme. We boot a full disk image. The bugs that only show up during a real boot, module loading failures, get caught here.

In this talk, I'll walk through how we boot real disk images in CI, run test suites against every patch, and catch regressions before they hit your branch, all without a test lab.
I'll explain the pipeline design, demo the full cycle from patch to test results, and cover what it takes to go from "nothing" to a working multi-arch kernel CI.
We're also making this pipeline portable and open for others to use.

If you maintain a kernel and want real integration testing without the overhead of a test lab, this talk is for you.