[cjbprime]

Most of the time I worked on drivers with kernel modules, so the fast path is just build && rmmod foo && modprobe foo && test. That's fine.

But I was working for a hardware manufacturer too (One Laptop Per Child), making its own laptop designs and doing board bringups on them, and when the point is to test real hardware you don't get shortcuts like using a VM. :)

The shortcut we had for trying to maintain productivity while testing real hardware was actually to stop using Linux: we had a port of Open Firmware that was the first thing run on new hardware, and then running tests (e.g. bisecting how large the timeout on a device request needed to be) could be done in a live OFW Forth REPL, and then ported to Linux from there.