Using qemu to instrument Windows
Part of the problem that we face in providing Linux hardware support is that we're lucky if there's a spec, and even if there's a spec there almost certainly isn't a test suite. Linux still isn't high on the list of things that vendors test with, so as a result hardware and firmware tend to be written to work with Windows rather than some more ideal notion of what a spec actually says.
This can lead to all kinds of problems. If the spec says we can do something and Windows never does that, we'll often find that there's at least one piece of hardware out there somewhere that breaks in response. But sometimes there'll be several different workarounds, and picking the wrong one may break some other system instead. It's helpful to know what Windows is actually doing, if only because that's the only configuration most systems have been tested with.
The problem is that doing this at the hardware level is next to impossible. I'm sure there are people out there who salivate at the possibility of working out i8042 initialisation sequences by hooking up oscilloscopes to their mouse, but I'm not one of them. There's a much easier alternative involving qemu.
The qemu source base is reasonably large and complex, but that's ok - we don't need to care about most of it. For our purposes we really only want to trace accesses to given bits of hardware. There's three main types of hardware access we're likely to care about: io ports, memory mapped io and pci configuration space. io ports are easy. Each piece of qemu that performs hardware emulation will call register_ioport_read or register_ioport_write. Just grep for those, find the ports that correspond to your hardware and then edit the functions to dump the information you want. PCI configuration space will be handled via pci_default_read_config or pci_default_write_config unless the driver overrides them. Finally, for PCI devices mmio will be handled via pci_register_bar - the last argument is the function called when the memory region is accessed.
All of which makes it pretty easy to watch register reads and writes performed by Windows when it's starting up. Suspend/resume is also an interesting problem, but sadly one that's harder to work with. First of all, you need at least version 0.6c of vgabios in order to indicate to Windows that it's possible to suspend at all. Secondly, for Vista or later you'll also need a WDDM driver for the graphics. Sadly there isn't one for the Cirrus that qemu emulates, which is unsurprising given how ancient it is. So I've had to perform my testing under XP, which was enough to give me an indication as to what Windows does with the SCI_EN bit on resume (answer: Ignores both the bit of the spec that says it should already be enabled and the bit of the spec that says it should never be written by hand). Nice, but if someone would like to write a WDDM driver for Cirrus it'd make my life easier.
The other thing I've been testing is keyboard controller probing. Some Macs deal badly with you banging on the keyboard controller, which is dumb but on the other hand they don't claim to have one. Linux will look at your ACPI tables and use any keyboard controllers it finds there, but if there isn't one it'll go on to try probing the legacy locations. Adding some debug code to the read and write functions of the keyboard driver in qemu and then editing the DSDT in Seabios to remove the declarations for the keyboard showed that Windows will only probe if there's a device with a recognised keyboard PNP ID. No keyboard for you if that's missing. So we probably need to emulate that behaviour as well.
The main reason to do this work is to try to reduce the number of DMI tables in the kernel. These are cases where we alter the kernel's behaviour based on the identity string of the hardware, allowing us to work around functional differences. The problem with this approach is that Windows generally works fine on these machines without knowing anything special about them, and chances are that the tables aren't exhaustive - there may well be some other piece of hardware that's also broken, but the user just gave up and went back to Windows instead of ever letting us know. Using qemu to work out how Windows actually behaves gives us the opportunity to fix things up in a way that will (with luck) work on all machines.