Design Goals

DejaGnu grew out of the internal needs of Cygnus Solutions, the company formerly known as Cygnus Support. Cygnus maintained and enhanced a variety of free programs in many different environments and we needed a testing tool that:

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 coded, any test can use it. Currently DejaGnu can use rsh, rlogin, telnet, tip, kermit and mondfe for remote communications.