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