AI Helps Reverse Engineer Hardware Drivers

A developer successfully used AI to reverse engineer drivers for a film scanner and a laptop camera that lacked Linux support. By leveraging an AI tool to analyze USB traffic and Windows driver behavior, the developer created a working SANE driver for the Plustek 8200i scanner and improved the MIPI camera support on a Lenovo ThinkPad. The process involved capturing data from Windows and Linux environments, comparing the results, and generating patches for the kernel and libcamera. The developer also created a generic harness to make the process easier for others, highlighting how AI can expedite the tedious task of reverse engineering undocumented hardware.