Mocking Hardware
Unit Testing Firmware drew a clean line around the logic that needs nothing from the hardware at all — a parser, a state machine, a checksum — and pointed at this page for the harder case: logic whose whole job is to talk to a peripheral. A driver cannot be tested by giving it inputs and checking outputs the way a parser can, because its inputs and outputs are register writes and register reads, and there is no register to read from on a laptop. Testing it on the host requires something on the other end of the bus that behaves like the real device without being it.