Description
FAUmachine is a virtual machine, similar in many respects
to VMWare[tm], QEMU or Virtual PC[tm].
What distinguishes FAUmachine from these other virtual
machines, are the following features:
- The FAUmachine virtual machine runs as a normal user
process (no root privileges or kernel modules needed) on
top of (currently) Linux on i386 and AMD64 hardware. The
port of FAUmachine to OpenBSD and Mac OS X (intel) is in
progress.
- Fault injection capability for experimentation in
FAUmachine.
- VHDL interpreter for automating experiments and tests
based upon our project fauhdlc. We also ship example
scripts for our VHDL interpreter that allow the automatic
installation of several Linux distributions and other
operating systems using the distribution's cdrom.
The CPU of FAUmachine is based on the virtual CPU from
Fabrice Bellard's excellent QEMU simulator, which can
execute almost anything a real x86/AMD64 CPU can execute,
too.
FAUmachine simulates a large variety of different hardware
components, including
- several x86 and AMD64 CPUs,
- IDE and SCSI controllers,
- NE2000- and Intel eepro100 network interface adapters,
- an SB16 sound card,
- a generic VGA and a Cirrus GD5446 graphics adapter,
- a 24 and a 48 pin direct-I/O PCI-card,
but also peripherals such as
- networking hubs and routers,
- serial terminals,
- modems,
- a USB-to-Serial adapter,
- and even a three-story elevator.
Additionally, FAUmachine can not only simulate a PC, but
also its environment, like power switches, the monitor, the
power supply and even the interaction of the user. The
virtual user can recognize text and bitmaps on the screen
and react to it by typing, moving and clicking the mouse,
pressing the reset button, and the like.
One of the main differences to other virtual machines like
QEMU, VirtualBox, Bochs or VMware is, that FAUmachine can
be configured on a very fine granular level. Such details
include, to what memory bank a memory module is connected
to, or which PCI-slot a PCI-card is inserted into.
Of course FAUmachine supports networking. It can be
connected to the local network which its host machine is
attached to in a masquerading-like way using slirp, or even
transparently via a TUN/TAP-bridging interface. If the
appropriate servers are running on the FAUmachine, login
from any real machine is possible, once the network is set
up.
FAUmachine has the ability to take screenshots of the
simulated monitor. It also comes with facilities to record
a movie of the virtual screen during simulation, which can
be re-coded to OGG/Theora using our tool faum-encoder.
News
-
Current release: 20110812.
Acknowledgement
Parts of FAUmachine were supported by the European Community (DBench Project, IST-2000-25425).
Contact
Please feel free to mail comments, questions and suggestions to a member of the FAUmachine project team or to info@faumachine.org.
Send any bugs you find to bugs@faumachine.org.
Dr.-Ing. Volkmar Sieh
Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Informatik 3
Martensstraße 3
91058 Erlangen
Germany
Tel.: ++49 (0) 9131 - 85-27911
Fax.: ++49 (0) 9131 - 85-27912
Mail: info@faumachine.org
