Am also an embedded dev. What toolchains do you use and how do you set them up using docker? Can you provide some sort of guide, because you already said. First investment is pretty high.
I use embedded Linux, not rtos chips. The tool chain is generated by yocto. Yocto is an embedded Linux from scratch distro creator. It creates images and environment for cross development. My connection with the docker was not so toolchain related, but system component test related. I modified the testing harnesses of yocto to start docker containers that serve a kernel zImage(over tftp) and a copy of the pristine ext4 image over nfs. With some program scriptology I made in python I was able to have serial boot log expects as well as boot time monitoring. I made a write up about it but it seems not many people dabble in such topics as SCTs for embedded devices[1]. I must say that embedded developing is a kind of a lonely experience,compared with for example the docker and web developer communities.
Regarding the investment it is an embedded industry problem. There is very little re-use. My experience is that we are an industry of wheel reinvention, where all of us are deep experts so we roll everything on our own. Maybe against myself I speak as I indeed developed this harnesses even though other solutions exist. My quip with what exists is that Intel absolutely owns, or used to own yocto and embedded tooling open source projects. This lead to very crappy code that was Intel specific being half merged into upstream. Mind you their featues are really not working,and were accepted because Intel is a gold yocto project sponsor. When you try to remove the broken code to a more sane one, you cannot because then the actual good rules of making small changes will bite you back and your changes will not be accepted. So you need to wait for Intel to cave in to remove their broken features. I digress sorry :). Even so Yocto project is a great step towards embedded projects productivity and knowledge re-use.
https://www.reddit.com/r/embeddedlinux/comments/bk8a8k/yocto...
Regarding the investment it is an embedded industry problem. There is very little re-use. My experience is that we are an industry of wheel reinvention, where all of us are deep experts so we roll everything on our own. Maybe against myself I speak as I indeed developed this harnesses even though other solutions exist. My quip with what exists is that Intel absolutely owns, or used to own yocto and embedded tooling open source projects. This lead to very crappy code that was Intel specific being half merged into upstream. Mind you their featues are really not working,and were accepted because Intel is a gold yocto project sponsor. When you try to remove the broken code to a more sane one, you cannot because then the actual good rules of making small changes will bite you back and your changes will not be accepted. So you need to wait for Intel to cave in to remove their broken features. I digress sorry :). Even so Yocto project is a great step towards embedded projects productivity and knowledge re-use. https://www.reddit.com/r/embeddedlinux/comments/bk8a8k/yocto...