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 needs to be re-boxed.

[0x1337]

Wow.... ummmm.... slashdot?

Could we not post "news" about things that came out an eon ago? Seriously... ROFL,,,,

----->

Bochs is kind-of OK. I use it regularly when I work on my exokernel project and it really IS A GREAT developing/debugging tool (especially if compiled with the GDB stubs ;-)).

However, however, however... I wouldn't consider Bochs useful for anything other than hacking around with kernel/os stuff. Bochs needs a re-write from scratch and emulate a real standard PC motherboard - not an 80386 with i486, pentium, athlon, mmx, PCI, USB, ATA etc... hacks around it. PCI support is non-existent. Video is flakey - well you can get VESA-compliant > 800x600 if you physically change the source (easy). All emulated devices are ISA "bus"-based. Over the years stuff just kind-of gotten piled on, and on and on - with no sensible strucure. I am not talking out of my ass either - at some point in my life I felt that Bochs would be a great project to hack.

Re:Bochs needs to be re-boxed.

[gl4ss]

for early 90's era games dosbox does excellent job most of the time. http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

Re:capable of running serious OSes as well

[acidrain69]

And it runs on more than just IA-32. I have it running on my dual Alpha 533. Runs win98.

Re:Bochs is not your answer

[Bob.Smart]

qemu seems to do emulation right. It would be nice if the emulation community would get behind it.

If you want free VMWare check out Xen

[enosys]

If you want free VMWare check out Xen. It's GPLed and it should actually be faster than VMWare. There is a catch though: the OS that runs inside must be modified. Linux is already supported. XP is almost ready but I wonder if they'll be allowed to distribute their modifications.

Xen has already been covered on slashdot

Re:If you want free VMWare check out Xen

[KrispyKringle]

Or check out Plex86. It's by the maker of Bochs, but designed to be more like VMWare. Caveat: it only runs Linux at the moment.

Check out qemu

[lsd]

If you want a free, open-source and (fairly) portable x86 emulator that provides better performance than Bochs then you could do far worse than QEMU. It uses a nifty dynamic recompilation techinque for its CPU emulation which gives much better speed than Bochs's interpretive emulation while remaining relatively easy to port.

It's a young project, and it has a long way to go before it'll be a real alternative to VMWare for most people, but it's getting there pretty quickly - the recently released 0.5.2 can already run Windows 98.

Re:we want 64-bit

[LnxAddct]

It can emulate AMD's 64 bit processor just fine.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Windows 98 doesn't even work on it

[\\]

I actually got Windows 98 installed and running on my Powerbook running OS X 10.3.

It took several hours for it just to install, so long that I went to bed while waiting for it to finish.. and when I woke up, the install stopped somewhere and needed me to click continue or something. Took several more hours after that to install, for a total of something like eight hours, if not more.

Once installed it ran EXTREMELY slow, and considering the OS X port of Bochs can't get online.. well, besides the fun of installing it, it's useless.

Re:Speaking of emulation, OT like mad

[brion]

QEMU has some experimental support for emulating a PowerPC (or SPARC or ARM or x86) processor, though of course it's less likely that many people would want to do so.

QEMU's not as mature as Bochs, but it's much faster, based on dynamic translation; you might think of it as a little more like a JIT compiler than an emulator. The other really interesting thing about QEMU is that in addition to a full-machine emulation mode, it can run Linux binaries from one architecture directly, translating the system call parameters as necessary. In theory at least you should be able to run binary-only x86 software -- or win32 programs on Wine -- on Linux-PPC for instance.

what would be the limit ...

[Anonymous Coward]

of the silliness/interesting possibilities of layering all these things:

Win98 on top of
VMWare on top of
Boch (or some other x86) on top of
OS/X, Linux, FreeBSD of top of ....

hehe, stupid, but might be fun to try if you got spare cpu power laying around... + plus you get to see what exactly VMware is doing to hardware (by looking a Bochs layer), or swap it around, and see what exactly Win98 is doing. Might be useful to find out all that hidden "functionality" in Windows for something like the Wine project. Just mouthing off here though...

Re:Speaking of emulation, OT like mad

[brion]

Why doesn't Bochs copy the usabillity of Virtual PC

Bochs is really a debugging tool for people writing their own OS. It's written to be accurate and portable, not fast or convenient. For those of us not writing our own operating systems, we're just not the target audience.

I've already extolled the virtues of QEMU's interesting capabilities and much greater speed. It's also I think a little easier to use than Bochs. It's not point and click, but it's a little more UNIX-friendly: you can run it from the command line in a sane manner compared with trying to cobble together a cryptic configuration file for Bochs.

QEMU isn't perfect, though. While the latest release will run Windows 98, it may spontaneously crash during installation, etc, and so far only runs under Linux (though a Darwin port is in the works).