Teaching electronics in time of disease - virtual lab for Linux in embedded systems

The pandemic crisis has significantly complicated the teaching of electronics in universities.
The necessity to work remotely has disabled access to the hardware labs.
In the teaching of embedded systems, the possibility of working with real hardware is really important.
Fortunately, the embedded computer system itself may be efficiently emulated with QEMU.
However, the problem may be the emulation of its environment, the I/O devices, especially those providing the user interface.
This paper describes the methods to modify and use QEMU to emulate the real board used in the labs. It also discusses the advantages and limitations of such an approach.
The elaborated methodology may be useful also after the pandemic, to support and improve teaching in normal conditions, e.g., by allowing students to perform at home the realistic experiments on emulated hardware.