There is a great deal of similarity in how the hardware is presented to the OS. The driver interfaces with the hardware at a very low level. This precludes accessing it from the guest OS since you can't have two operating systems accessing the hardware at the same time.
Never ever under any circumstances test hardware in virtual and think the test has even the slightest meaning.
Somewhat true. It depends on the hardware. Though I agree that testing using a virtual machine isn't sufficient.
For proper hardware testing, a real OS is required. Virtual machine access can identify other problems where the state of the real hardware is not properly passed to the guest OS, such as with the faxboards. Some USB devices have a similar problem.
However, Ethernet is a known quantity. The virtual Intel EtherPro passed to a guest OS is identical to a real Intel card as far as the guest OS is concerned. This makes it a good candidate for certain kinds of testing.
When I was considering replacing some older gigabit cards with new Intel cards I tested setting up VLANs and jumbo frames on the virtual cards first to determine proper syntax of the startup commands.
When I installed real cards with a real OS, the hardware probing results were identical.
Even when the root OS isn’t doing anything with the hardware, even when the root OS doesn’t have the drivers installed so it CAN’T do anything with the hardware, it doesn’t get passed through to the virtual. The virtual never finds out they exist.
Nope always true. One of the first rules of testing: anything that sometimes invalidates the test ALWAYS invalidates the test. Is there hardware that works identically under virtual? Of course. But for the testing to be valid you have to prove that the hardware you’re working with does, which means you have to do at least one identical pass under virtual and real and get 100% identical results. Of course if you’re going to be doing real machine testing anyway there’s not much reason to do virtual.
There you go again assuming the hardware is identical to the function. Ethernet is a known quantity, Dell’s specific implementation of ethernet is NOT.