Verification of Linux device drivers using device virtualization

Nowadays, there is a rapid increase in usage of the embedded systems in consumer, industrial, automation and commercial applications. Linux being an open source and fastest growing operating system supports many hardware architectures. The flexibility it offers for the developers makes Linux the default choice for many embedded system boards. There is a very high demand for Linux porting onto various embedded boards which includes development of Board Support Packages (BSP), device drivers and so on. In order to quickly test these developed BSPs and device drivers without the real hardware and with continuous change in I/O devices for various applications, there is an immediate need for platform and device virtualization. Linux supports large number of hypervisors. The widely used hypervisor schemes are Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), lguest and Quick Emulator (QEMU). QEMU is an open source hypervisor and highly supports the Linux KVM and device emulation using Qdev framework. QEMU can also be used to virtualize the platform and application software. This paper discusses in detail about developing an I/O device virtualization for QEMU emulator which is generally used for faster Linux device driver verification and testing.