Hi all
I think people missed one of the points in my email, which is that build is only part of the problem. I'm well aware of cross compilation and emulators for builds, however neither of these environments provides a fully capable *test* environment. This is where a hardware farm is one solution, one which wouldn't require everyone who wants to contribute to purchase their own hardware. From my experience porting the remote GDB backend to a custom JTAG debug architecture it makes everything much easier to debug in an embedded architecture when you can inspect internal state over JTAG. Whilst emulators can provide a good debug environment, they never completely reflect the behaviour of the actual hardware in terms of timing, lockups, undocumented behaviour etc.
Thoughts?
Joel