ARM boards testbed

[pharos]

Hello all,

I've wondering if there is a standard way to test an OS on some ARM boards like the raspberry, orange pi, beagle black, pine64, etc. I guess the requirements (that at least I was looking for) would be to be able to:
- load the image through the SD card (or the eMMC flash)
- be able to connect some output through an UART (guess this is the easiest part)
- debug though a JTAG or any other mechanism (like the TI debug probes) and support a gdb server

Does anyone have a way to do this that could these things in a semi-standard way?

How do the guys at Linux and etc test their OS? Do they have a special hw? I imagine that running 100s or 1000s of tests by manually programming the sd card and testing it is completely out of the question.

Thanks,
Pedro

[OSwhatever]

If you have a JTAG, then you don't need write to the SD card, then put into the dev board everytime. In general JTAG can write directly to RAM and sometimes even flash if you have a script for it and then you can just load it directly. Fiddling with SD cards will slow you down a lot.

JTAG + debugger is in general superior for OS development but something you have buy.