Sure, One immediate benefit I could see is the independence of hardware board (even those without any controller). You could run and schedule automated test on

Sure, One immediate benefit I could see is the independence of hardware board (even those without any controller). You could run and schedule automated test on VM, without instrumenting your code. This is more relevant for System tests and integration. Also since we emulate transactions at bus layer, it works more accurate rather than software tests. We recently found a bug in a driver where it had a hardcoded time to wait for response, instead of waiting for interrupt status. Such a thing would work in real hardware but fails on our simulated tests. Last but not least, sensor manufacturer could provide more accurate models of device behavior through our software which could then be tested against compensation values applied in your driver.