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Background: Intel AMT is a remote management built into many Intel CPUs. It includes power control, VNC server, remote CD, remote BIOS configuration and more.

Why?

1. Allows testing on real hardware (specifically desktop/laptop x86), including hardware compatibility testing (kernel panic on boot etc).
2. Potentially better for testing virtualization-based applications (including Qubes OS) - nested virtualization is not so stable.

How?
Preliminary PoC: https://github.com/marmarek/os-autoinst/tree/amt

Right now very limited, implemented:

• power control
• boot device control
• VNC

Partially implemented:

• serial console (should it be serial0, or serial_terminal? communication is bi-directional, but there is only one serial console)

Missing:

• remote HDD/CD - Linux implementation is unstable and incapable of emulating full DVD (size limit is about 2GB); workaround: use network boot

See commit message for details.

Great source of info about AMT on Linux: http://senseless.info/amt.html

Next steps:

• more testing
• finish serial console support
• stabilize remote HDD/CD (hard, require low-level knowledge about SCSI), or setup network-boot based infrastructure (maybe just documentation is enough)

I've done this for testing Qubes OS, but right now have very little motivation for finishing it (for current use cases nested virtualization with sufficient number of workarounds is enough). Maybe it will be useful for others.