[nanolith]

As for standardizing on hardware and toolchain, what I mean is that I try to get projects to commit to using specific hardware and a specific toolchain. The goal is to limit variables for automated testing and analysis.

OpenBSD, in particular, is adamant about testing their OS on real hardware for platforms that they support. Their definition of "working" is on real hardware. I think that's a reasonable goal.

It helps with analysis like this, as you don't have to worry about different compilers or different hardware. GCC, in particular, can produce different output depending on which hardware it was compiled on, unless a specific configuration is locked down. If there is a flaw in how it does vector operations on a particular Xeon processor, this won't be caught if testing locally on a Core i5 processor that produces different code.