[daeken]

Given the number of times I've bricked hardware during reverse-engineering and driver development, I don't find it super likely, tbh. I'm by no means an expert here, but it's one of those things where if you already have good enough documentation (which in this case could be a known-good implementation) then it's more of a translation task and LLMs could absolutely be helpful there, but the edge cases are sharp and frequent.

[ninkendo]

It's interesting though, because you don't really need to reverse engineer anything if the device has an in-tree Linux driver. You "just" need to port the Linux driver to your OS. This is certainly something an LLM can help with, although the usual skepticism applies (it works until it doesn't, etc.)

In fact I sometimes wonder whether it's feasible to write a new kernel while somehow shimming into Linux's driver model, while still keeping your own kernel unique (ie. not just a straight clone of Linux itself.) Some way of "virtualizing" the driver layer so that a driver can "think" it's in a Linux kernel but with a layer of indirection to everything somehow.