In the old days, that was how we tested and debugged device drivers. The very best way to debug such a system was for engineers to use the embedded system as a development system and—once adequate system maturity was reached— take away the original cross-development system!
For your situation, several approaches come to mind:
- Add ioctl handlers: each code exercises a particular unit test
- With conditional compilation, add a main() to the driver which conducts functional unit tests in the driver and outputs results to
stdout. - For initial ease in debugging, maybe this could be made multi-platform operable so you don’t have to debug on the target hardware.
- Perhaps conditional code can also emulate a loopback-style device.