General peripheral knowledge--yes. Maybe, programming a modern DMA based device running in a full blown OS with userspace, kernel space, an IO MMU, giving you

General peripheral knowledge--yes. Maybe, programming a modern DMA based device running in a full blown OS with userspace, kernel space, an IO MMU, giving you bus IOVA addressing through a VM, with multiple command buffers, SRIOV, etc, while not wildly different isn't the same as doing IO read/writes into a fixed MMIO mapped device region. Doing some basic SPI programming is a start, but one has to understand there are a lot more layers that get added as the systems grows from a AVR level device to a modern server.