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DejaGnu grew out of the internal needs of Cygnus Solutions (formerly Cygnus Support). Cygnus maintained and enhanced a variety of free programs in many different environments and needed a testing tool that:
GDB
; and
GCC
.
Some of the requirements proved challenging. For example, interactive
programs do not lend themselves very well to automated testing. But all
the requirements are important. For instance, it is imperative to make
sure that GDB
works as well when cross-debugging as it does in a
native configuration.
Probably the greatest challenge was testing in a cross-development
environment. Most cross-development environments are customized by each
developer. Even when buying packaged boards from vendors there are many
differences. The communication interfaces vary from a serial line to
Ethernet. DejaGnu was designed with a modular communication setup, so
that each kind of communication can be added as required and supported
thereafter. Once a communication procedure is written, any test can use
it. Currently DejaGnu can use ssh
, rsh
, rlogin
,
telnet
, tip
, and kermit
for remote communications.