I am wondering if there is a standard solution to a problem that I am facing. Say you are developing an embedded Debian Linux device. You want to have a "test farm" - a bunch of copies of your target hardware running a lot of tests, while the development is ongoing. For this to work automatically, your automation setup needs to have a way to fully re-flash the device, even if the image previously flashed to it does not boot. How would that be usually achieved?

I'd imagine some sort of option in the initial bootloader that would look at some hardware switch (that your test host could trip programmatically) and if that is set, then boot into a very minimal and very stable "emergency" Linux system, then you could ssh into that, mount the target partitions and rewrite their contents with the new image to be tested.

Are there ready-made solutions that do such a thing? Generically or even just for some specific development boards? Do people solve this problem in a completely different way? Was unable to find any good info online.