GNOME dev open-sources hw-harness for AI-assisted Linux driver reverse engineering
GNOME developer Christian Schaller describes on his blog how he used Claude Code with a self-built test harness to reverse-engineer Linux drivers for hardware that lacked support, and has now generalized that harness into an open-source project called hw-harness. The method records the vendor's Windows driver running in a KVM virtual machine with the real device passed through, captures USB traffic on the Linux host with usbmon, repeats the same operation with his own driver, and diffs the two traces; for devices with no bus to tap, such as an internal MIPI camera, it inspects INF files, registry data, ACPI tables and device properties instead. The write-up covers a SANE backend for the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i scanner (faster at full resolution in his single-unit test, 34.6 s versus 54.4 s for upstream), the Rust GNOME app Negative Vibes, and kernel plus libcamera fixes for the MIPI camera in a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14. He cautions that the measurements come from one device and single frames, that the original work used bespoke scripts rather than this harness, and that real hardware remains the only judge.
It shows how AI coding agents can compress the tedious parts of hardware reverse engineering while humans still hold the hardware and verify results.