Choosing the right environment

[philipp.muhoray@gmail.com (Philipp Muhoray)]

Hello there,

After reading LDD and LKD, I feel ready to start some actual kernel 
hacking. Therefore I wanted to ask you what environment I should use in 
the beginning. I have several options, but I'm not sure on which one to 
set up my workspace:


- I could develop directly on and against my main machines 
(desktop/laptop) ? This is probably not a good idea, since they are used 
in ?production? and I don't want to mess things up there

- I could go with a virtual machine on one of my main machines ? But I'm 
not quite sure whether the hardware-abstraction will give me troubles 
when hacking on hardware drivers (which I want to start with)

- I could also use my Raspberry Pi ? I'm only afraid that the slightly 
different environment (SD card instead of hard disk, ARM instead of x86, 
limited I/O) could turn out to be a larger obstacle than I thought

- I have some pretty old stand alone desktops which I could use ? But 
the hardware is so old (2004ish)


I think my preference is the Raspberry Pi, because I would work on 
actual modern hardware without worrying about messing things up. Are 
there some drawbacks I'm not considering? Or am I just overthinking 
this? What did you use in the beginning?


Best regards,

Philipp

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