I am looking into purchasing a JTAG dongle for doing U-Boot/Linux Porting + Linux Driver development (essentially all GNU stuff). Would anyone recommend Lauterbach over the bdi2000 or vice versa? And why would one pick one over another?
Yes, of course. Lauterbach will recommend ... guess what?, and Abatron will ...
There are many sides to be considered, including existing equipment and experience. When you have a box from vendor XXX stting on your desk you should probably use it. When you have ten years of experience using the tools from vendor YYY you should probably use their tools again.
Having said this, I can say that DENX is using the BDI2000 exclusive- ly, on ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, ColdFire, ... The bdiGDB version of the firmware allows for an excellent integration in any Linux based development environment. The biggest advantage is that you can use the very same debug interface for U-Boot, Linux kernel and drivers, and for application code (there is no difference if you attach GDB or DDD or Insight or ... to the BDI2000 or to a gdbserver running on the target). Also, Abatron technical support is the best I have seen so far in the tools area.
We have evaluated BDI2000 and used Lauterbach in the past. Lauterbach is definitely the best choice for debugging many different target CPU running Linux and WinCE, but debugging environment is mainly targeted for Windows, and is too much expensive.
At the moment we use Ronetix' PEEDI debugger and support it with our products. PEEDI has almost the same features as BDI2000 but is faster and costs less, unfortunately does not support yet PowerPC and MIPS but supports all ARM7, ARM9, XScale, based MCUs as well as AT91SAM7, LPC2000, MAC7100, STR7, STR9 and TMS470 families. It give an excellent integration in any Linux based development environment too. It is the only debugger I know that allow NAND Flash programming. Link: http://www.ronetix.com
HTH Best regards