paper on reverse-engineering drivers

[Nate Lawson]

This might be a useful source for making ACPI compatible with Windows.

http://dslab.epfl.ch/pubs/revnic

I had thought of a project like this before. My idea was to take QEMU
and map PCI config space and allow direct access to the bare hardware
for only one device. The developer would install Windows in this QEMU
image on a system with the target device, identify it by its PCI id, and
then run Windows normally. The VM would log the driver's accesses to
config space as well as use CoW semantics for DMA accesses to memory and
IO ports.

Now that Intel/AMD support hardware virtualization and DMA isolation, it
would be better to do this with a modified Xen hypervisor.

-- 
Nate