[Gamester17]

ARM emulators (virtual machine emulator) could possibly make porting easier for those developers who do not actually have any ARM hardware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_...l_machines

QEMU emulator looks most promising at a first glance as it is both free and open source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU

QEMU emulates the armv5tej instruction set and all the derivative processors families like ARM7, ARM9E, ARM10E and XScale. It emulates full systems like Integrator/CP board, Versatile baseboard, RealView Emulation baseboard, XScale-based PDAs, Palm Tungsten|E PDA, Nokia N800 and Nokia N810 internet tablets etc. Qemu also powers the Android emulator which is part of the Android SDK (most current Android implementations are ARM based).

http://qemu.org

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance.

When used as a virtualizer, QEMU achieves near native performances by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. QEMU supports virtualization when executing under the Xen hypervisor or using the KVM kernel module in Linux. When using KVM, QEMU can virtualize x86, server and embedded PowerPC, and S390 guests.

QEMU open source software simulator for x86 that can emulate systems with processors of various architectures, including 386, x86_64, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and Sparc. For ARM, two emulated platforms are available -- an older "Integrator" platform, and a newly-added "Versatile" platform.

The new Versatile platform includes a SCSI hard disk controller, Ethernet card, and graphical display. According to french Debian developer Aurelien Jarno (who published a HOW-TO about installing Debian or another Linux distributions on the open-source QEMU emulator), when run on an Athlon 64 3800+, running under QEMU can perform 20 percent faster than the ARM-based LinkSys NSLU2 (an inexpensive network-attached storage appliance that is commonly pressed into service as a full Debian ARM development target).

Jarno's HOW-TO begins by describing how to download and install QEMU from CVS, to ensure that the latest Versatile platform support is included. He then configures QEMU to emulate a 10GB hard drive, and downloads a publicly shared Versatile kernel that he created (Debian ARM does not yet include a kernel that supports the image, he says). Next he downloads Debian's "Etch" installer, and bootstraps the installer using a qemu-system-arm command.

Jarno's HOW-TO next describes several harmless error messages, leading ultimately to the emulated ARM system's first boot. Jarno's HOW-TO completes the basic installation by installing a more complete kernel.

Jarno's HOW-TO goes on to explore a few more advanced topics, such as running an Xorg server, increasing the amount of RAM to the maximum supported size of 256MB, and setting up a network bridge to allow the emulated system access to the Internet. The HOW-TO closes with a list of additional resources.

The full HOW-TO can be found here (link) was first published in 2006