New twist on virtualization - FAUmachine might be the next cool thing | Hacker News Reader

New twist on virtualization - FAUmachine might be the next cool thing

linux-mag.com

52 pointsrytis9 comments

I agree with ehutch79, x86 virtualisation is well over 10 years old. There are many free (both as in freedom and as in beer) virtualisation options available currently, does FAUmachine cream everything else in terms of performance or ease of management or something?

I don't mean to detract from the academic aspects, nor from the effort that must have been put in. But "next cool thing"?

It is aimed at debugging embedded systems, not at server virtualization. Performance and ease of management are not so imporant in this case, configurability and ease of writing virtual devices is.

Fair enough - I can't really argue without trivialising things somewhat so I'll just leave it that :)

I think there's a disconnect in the headline, and what the software does. I can definitely see how that would be very useful to the right people, I don't see how it could be the 'cool new thing in VMs'

Agreed. It's very cool to a limited amount of people that build/debug/reverse engineer hardware and device drivers.

On the other hand we're on a hacker forum, so this might be a surprisingly large share.

Reading a bit the project site the only interesting (not to the general public) thing is the fault injection extension to qemu that uses a subset of VHDL* to define tests, even if it's not really clear what you can do with that. Definitely not a "new twist" in virtualization, just an extension to test/develop academic projects.

* http://www3.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/Research/fauhdlc/

In what way is this new? It seems like it's just a fork of qemu with fault injection. i don't see how that's helpful to a general audience.

It appears as if this will be a great tool for developing device drivers.

This looks really handy for testing and debugging complete systems. I've always thought VMWare was a bit overkill for this, and have never found anything else that made me want to switch. This is easy enough so as to make it trivial. Although, I will have to check to see if you can fire it up from the command line to use in the development process, ironically enough.

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