Bochs 2.0 Released

Jas Sandys-Lumsdaine writes "Bochs 2.0 has just been released - project lead Bryce Denney writes: "It's been a busy 6 months since our previous release! Bochs is now about twice as fast as version 1.4.1. Also, we can now emulate MMX instructions, SSE/SSE2, and even AMD x86-64 instructions if you turn on the appropriate configure options. The emulation improvements have paid off; several people have been able to install Windows XP recently." Excellent stuff."

Comments

Boch vs. VMWare

[thopo]

Does anyone one know which one of them is faster, or let's just say better?

I need Windows on Linux....

[seanadams.com]

But I have to admit I'm not all that well read on the state-of-the art in emulation. I know that Wine is like a clone of Windows running natively on Unix, so it's fast. Bochs is a full-blown, platform independent emulator, so it's compatible but slow. Vmware is X86 only, so it's faster, right?

So many choices, but I really don't have time to try everything out. Mainly I care about compatibility over performance. $250 won't break the bank, but free is better of course. I need to run a few simple apps like UPS shipping software, but also a bunch of specialty stuff where hardware compatilibty might be hard and the apps aren't likely to have been thoroughly tested already (OrCAD, Microchip MPLAB, Xilinx WebPack, stuff like that). I could give a flying sh*t about games, but I suspect that's mostly what people want these for.

Could anyone with experience using several of these emulators shed some light? It'd be really nice if the authors would provide some compatiblity/performance/stability matrices for popular apps, to help us choose.

Re:I need Windows on Linux....

[garcia]

if $250 isn't going to break the bank, buy a Windows system and use it for Windows only. There is absolutely no valid reason for emulating under Linux if you have $250 to spend. You are going to get a lot more out of your money that way.

Re:Anything would be faster...

[reynaert]

If you just want to play old DOS games, try DOSBox. It's specifically designed for this goal, and cheats in various ways to make it fast (for example, the BIOS and DOS are built-in instead of emulated). The main problem with it is the lack of 386 Protected Mode support.

Possible for transparent x86 emulation on Linux?

[Ryu2]

One thing Linux on non-x86 platforms lacks is transparent X86 emulation, like on the Macintosh with its transparent 68K emulation, you click on a 68K app and it just works. I should be able to run a X86 ELF image on a non-X86 Linux box and have it just WORK! The Bochs approach is not the best way, since it's a virtual machine and emulates everything. A better way would be for X86 emulation only when needed, such as the application program code itself (syscalls continue to use the native library)

Anyone look at the possibility of incorporating such emulation into the Linux kernel? It would be a enormous boost for acceptance of Linux on non-X86 platforms.

So what happened to plex86?

[phr2]

www.plex86.org sends a 404. And plex86's Savannah project page doesn't show much sign of activity. Is it moribund? Dead? How did it compare with vmware at its last sign of life?

Re:Anything would be faster...

[runderwo]

Yes, DOSEMU usually works better, but AFAIK it only works on i386 and Linux (and maybe some BSDs).

BSD has their own "doscmd". Dosemu currently only works on Linux/i386, but they are adding a 386 emulated core that should eventually release the architecture restriction. It is, however, highly dependent on specific features that have been merged into the Linux kernel.