[sgtnoodle]

It sounds like the poster was targeting a microcontroller rather than a more generally capable "embedded" CPU. 16 bit CPU, probably on the order of 100KB RAM and code space total if you're lucky. No operating system in the common sense, although you might have some notion of task switching if you're fancy. "Wee" in that context would imply a footprint on the order of 1KB of code and maybe 100 bytes of RAM.

I assume, by saying there wasn't room for debugging functionality, the poster meant that the "jtag" or equivalent hardware port simply couldn't work for single stepping due to the particular architecture requiring compiled-in cooperation of the firmware, and they didn't have the kilobytes of memory to spare.

These days, it's becoming more reasonable to throw Linux based compute nodes at problems previously best served by microcontrollers. A more powerful CPU isn't a superset of a microcontroller, though. Microcontrollers are still necessary when you have "hard" timing requirements and you need to account for where your CPU cycles are going. Even seemingly "solved" problems like participating on a CAN bus is difficult for a Linux based node. For example, while you can easily purchase CAN interface boards for raspberry pi and send and receive messages, you are pretty much guaranteed to drop some percentage of incoming messages at realistic bitrates. All the boards use MCP2515 SPI CAN controllers, and the linux driver simply can't schedule SPI transfers in response to interrupts fast enough to avoid mailbox overruns inside the controller. Maybe it's somehow been cleverly fixed since I last looked at it though?

[ncmncm]

It is fairly common nowadays to run Linux as one task on an RTOS, and have other tasks manage the CAN controller and other devices that need a low latency response. Or, just to use a coprocessor for low-latency work, as is commonly done to manage wifi.

Routing gdb stub traffic through a hosted Linux to an RTOS task or coprocessor is not an elementary exercise, but is something an engineering student might be expected to implement, even as just part of the real project.