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

Posted by rytis on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @06:39AM
from the linux-mag.com dept.

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/8719/?hq_e=el&hq_m=1255710&hq_l=10&hq_v=f14a010529

( 9 comments | 52 points | on HN )

Re:New twist on virtualization - FAUmachine might be the nex... by sradnidge on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @08:06AM (#2579484)

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"?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:New twist on virtualization - FAUmachine might be the nex... by wladimir on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @08:09AM (#2579491)

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.

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Re:New twist on virtualization - FAUmachine might be the nex... by ehutch79 on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @11:29AM (#2580192)

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'

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Re:New twist on virtualization - FAUmachine might be the nex... by wladimir on Wednesday May 25, 2011 @03:15AM (#2583202)

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.

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Re:New twist on virtualization - FAUmachine might be the nex... by sradnidge on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @08:21AM (#2579526)

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

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Re:New twist on virtualization - FAUmachine might be the nex... by drtse4 on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @10:07AM (#2579818)

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/

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Re:New twist on virtualization - FAUmachine might be the nex... by ehutch79 on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @07:51AM (#2579457)

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.

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Re:New twist on virtualization - FAUmachine might be the nex... by timthorn on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @08:03AM (#2579477)

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

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Re:New twist on virtualization - FAUmachine might be the nex... by jasonkolb on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @08:39AM (#2579561)

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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