Device driver testing

In principle, the original hardware companies could do more to help with this. It's difficult to automate tests involving physical devices, and lab space is wanted for the current generation of devices under development. But initial device drivers are often developed on 'models' of the real device before it has come back from manufacturing. The hardware company could set up a regression job, downloading the most recent kernel and booting it on a simulator connected to the model of their device.

In practice, I suspect most hardware companies don't have sufficient incentive to do this, but they might for some products. Some teams also don't really have a model, preferring to develop their device using FPGAs. (I'm not counting RTL models, which are too expensive to run to use for software testing)