Workshop: Developing and testing a device driver without the device

The development of device drivers usually requires hardware availability. We will try to address this issue by simulating our “missing” device thanks to a QEMU ARM machine. The fake device will be tested and debugged using bare-metal software, again running in QEMU. Finally, we will write a Linux device driver from scratch that will interact with the device and expose it to the userspace.

The training assumes some basic knowledge of the C programming language and using Linux as a development platform. During the training, we will show how to build the Linux kernel and write a simple yet complete device driver, how to use QEMU as a development platform and a few notions of bare-metal and kernel code debugging.