Only tangentially related but maybe someone here can help me.

I have a server which has many peripherals and multiple GPUs. Now, I can use vfio and vfio-pcio to memory map and access their registers in user space. My question is, how could I start with kernel driver development? And I specifically mean the dev setup.

Would it be a good idea to use vfio with or without a vm to write and test drivers? How to best debug, reload and test changing some code of an existing driver?