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Bochs x86 IA-32 Emulator 2.1 Released

Posted by michael on from the curiously-useful dept.

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."

5 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Bochs needs to be re-boxed. by 0x1337 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Bochs needs to be re-boxed. by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

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      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  2. Re:capable of running serious OSes as well by acidrain69 · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    --
    -- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
  3. Re:Bochs is not your answer by Bob.Smart · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  4. Check out qemu by lsd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.