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."

Comments

Bochs is not your answer

[gotr00t]

Bochs is actually an emulator for an IA32 system, and though it has support for some Windows operating systems, don't expect to be able to do much with it, because its intent was not really to run windows programs on Linux and other OSes.

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.

Bochs is...

[simrook]

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