[rijoja]

Not a kernel developer, yet! I'd say that you ought to start out with using qemu/kvm to spin up a virtual machine. The qemu documentation itself contains some info on how to hook up a gdb debugger to the os.

Since it's a real hardware problem probably you'll need to set up some usb forwarding to the qemu program, but that should be doable I think.

Again not a kernel hacker but good luck to you!