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Bochs x86 IA-32 Emulator 2.1 Released
Asmodeus writes "Just noticed that the 2.1 release of the Bochs IA-32 emulator is out at the Bochs home page
For those not in the know, Bochs is an open source implementation of the x86 instruction set(s) and a virtual PC (al la VMWare) which is capable of booting FreeDOS and Linux under the host control of another OS."
Many others have already posted this, but VMware != Bochs, because VMware uses virtulization to run a guest OS with minor overhead on a host system. Bochs, on the other hand, emulates everything, even if the host system is IA32, causing massive performance degredation. I see that your applications are rather large scale(3DSMAX and Adobe applications) - and probably would rely heavily on graphics adaptor and memory. Bochs is definately not your answer, as if you could even get it to work, it would be so incredibly slow that you'll forget why you were doing it in the first place before the program even loads (trust me, it has happened before).
Look to VMware to do things like this - it may have a fee attached, but its fast and capable, but not open source.
I know that in the past, the number of registers of the PPC was far in excess of the capabillities of the x86. Example: No PPC emulator yet exists, no matter what vaporware merchants have said in the past.
Finally, my one experience with Bochs was on BeOS. I couldn't figure it out. On the other hand, Virtual PC was easy as pie. Why doesn't Bochs copy the usabillity of Virtual PC --- the gui is neat and clean, plenty of options; throw open source in the mix and we could have a weiner. (And a real alternative to MS owned, newly activation-coded Virtual PC.)
I stopped upgrading when MS bought it. It was only fair.
great for OS Systems development, but not much more. If you are programming an operating system, there is nothing better then Bochs running with gdb debugging stubs. Peroid. All this talk "Bochs can't run photoshop at a good speed" and "Bochs takes for ever to load windows" is bulljive. Of course it does, because that's not the point! Why do I own a 386 and use it with DOS 6.22? Because I want to do assembly programming and test out algorithms written in IA32 assembly. If I tried to run PS 8 and WinXP on it and subsequently complained about the speeds, I'd be flamed to death. The same goes for bochs. Kudos to the developers! A lot of great improvements were put into this release, everything from 3D assembly instructions to a whole new disassembler. Bochs is every OS Developer's dream come true. And it's just gettin' better... (Also, the best "bug fix" imho is that you don't need an extra font installed in X-Windows now). And if you want to emulate windows and have it run fast, go buy a $400 PC from Walmart. They play quake fine while waiting for the latest kernel to compile. :->
- Simrook
'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it...
Gotta love that blazing static instruction translation speed! Auctually I gotta say I've noticed large speed improvements on i86 hosts between this and 2.02. Now if only they would release 2.1.1 already with the bug fix so you can compile in both x11 anf rfb(VNC) console support Also the bochs people outright admit that it is slow. They refuse to add any kind of trickery like running instructions natively on intel becasue its meant for debugging OSes and the like. Sometimes you need to be able to run through your OS's boot up one instruction at a time to find a bug. This allos you to do that.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
it does give you the capabilities of VMWare, at a significant performance cost anyways.
You completely missed the point of the post you replied to, didnt you?
While Bochs might provide the capabilities of VMWare at a performance cost, VMWare does not provide any of the capabilities of Bochs. One is a complete and portable implementation in software of an entire architecture, the other merely virtualises an architecture.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Bochs is an open source implementation of the x86 instruction set(s) and a virtual PC (al la VMWare) which is capable of booting FreeDOS and Linux under the host control of another OS.
You're just placing the parentheses wrong. Grammatically, this says that Bochs is two things:
- open source implementation of the x86 instruction set(s)
- virtual PC (al [sic] la VMWare)
This is quite true.Surely they could create an archutecture that supports pluggable CPU libraries. Then you could run the full reference software x86 library, or those of us who simply want to run windows on our desktop could use a more sophisticated library. QEMU already has a portable x86 library that supports dynamic translation and is 65 times faster than BOCHS.
Too bad the mods aren't noticing your post.
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