Bochs, the x86 emulator, will celebrate its version 2.0 soon. Changes include: CPU optimizations boost simulation speed by around 2x, Bochs now supports up to 8 hard drives, or 8 CDROMs, or any combination, added support for the AMD x86-64 instruction set used in their Hammer processor, added support for MMX instructions, added support for SSE and SSE2 instructions, remote GDB stub support.
Get a Taste of Bochs 2.0
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Bochs2 looks pretty cool
At least, the included version of DLX Linux runs great!
Now if I only knew how I could install Win2K on it….
When I’ve tried to use Bochs 1.x, I’ve been bamboozled by how difficult it was to set up and use. If version 2.0 is not easier to use, then it’s going to remain a geek toy no matter how technologically good it may be
It *IS* a geek toy as it is not that fast due to the fact it is not a “virtual machine” like VMWare but it is a EMULATOR
this results in a big overhead (if I can say so)
But for PPC People it can get interessting…
Since every “x86-VM” on PPC has the same problem:
a NON-EXISTANT X86 Processor 🙂
-A
…Thats at least what I thing about it…
Some similar effort like VMWare was once called Plex (now restarted under different name)
Somehow Bochs and Plex belonged together, I thing…
PS:Some speed comparison between different X86 Emulators on PPC would be kewl…
The connection between Bochs and Plex86 is that both projects were started by Kevin Lawton.
Actually Bochs could be better if it was easier to use, although the speed also plays a big role of course.
BTW, apart from real mode, which can be simulated using the V86 mode, x86 processors aren’t really prepared to run virtual machines, so there are some slowdowns as well, but certianly not as severe as with a real emulator where every single instruction has to be emulated.
I don’t have a Mac, but Virtual PC certainly should be much faster than Bochs, because it is using dynamic recompilation, which Bochs doesn’t do.
Any info on Bochs 2.0 on BeOS?
I compiled the latest source for bochs from the sourceforge site… This was on a dual processor Mac running BeOS. It taking 5 minutes to boot DOS didn’t really make it usable. Whilst this could be a lack of BeOS support, it has ‘The Mac version is experimental’ plastered everywhere in the readme’s etc. I guess dreams of Bochs being fast are not yet met. My PM6100 running Virtual PC 2 is actually faster than my 9500 running Bochs. The 6100 has a 66mhz 601, where as the 9500 has dual 604e 180’s. Even if it’s using only one of these the performance is appaling in comparison. (I tried it using the dual processor bios and the regular one with no difference.)
Does anyone know what the performance of Bochs 1.x is, and 2.x is likley to be?
I would like to see some sort of table giving performance values like this :
Host* Bochs 1.x Bochs 2.x
P3 500MHz P2 233MHz P2 400MHz
P4 1Ghz P3 650MHz P3 733MHz
* Host has 256Mb RAM and is running RedHat Linux 8.0
(Note this is totally made up
)
Thanks
Andrew McCall
The PPC chip has a hardware x86 emulation bit in it which Virtual PC uses.
>The PPC chip has a hardware x86 emulation bit in it which Virtual PC uses.
Sounds like we already CAN move with Warp 10 in real world!
But what exactly do you mean with “EMULATION BIT”???
-A
Host* Bochs 1.x Bochs 2.x
P3 500MHz P2 233MHz P2 400MHz
P4 1Ghz P3 650MHz P3 733MHz
Hah, dream on, more like:
P3 500Mhz 486 66Mhz 486 100Mhz
if you are lucky. I run bochs 1.x on a 500Mhz Alpha, and its no speed demon in any way shape or form, but does the job i need it for nicely.
Virdal, for info on BeBOCHS 2 on BeOS, check out http://www.beosjournal.org later today (in a few hours).
Sorry for the link Eugenia, hope you don’t mind
I have both Bochs 1.4 and the latest windows build on sourceforge. The new installation setup was nice, but the interface for the most part is the same, except of course the added features and slightly rearranged menus. As for speed… 2x faster feels lilke a bit of a stretch. On the included Linux image I found the speed only slightly better. To further test the system I dug out my very first copy on windows. It was version 3.11 (lots of fun). I ran both Bochs 1.4 and 2.0 at the same time and proceeded with the installation of dos and then windows on both virtual machines (I wonder if I was suppoesed to have two windows licences for that?). In both cases the OSes installed perfectly, and as expected Bochs 2.0 finished first. There wasn’t as much a difference in times as I expected. I believe that is because installing Windows 3.11 is more of a disk operation, whereas I think most of the Bochs optimizations where on the CPU emulation.
Finally I played around a bit seeing how long some apps took to open, and general usability) in each environment, Bochs 2 was always a bit faster, but never monumentally so. Later I plan to try running a distributed.net client to get some hard numbers, but that will have to wait until I figure out how to get bochs’ network settings to work with my home’s proxy server. I hope this shed some light on the subject.
According to the bochs website, this “pre2” version was compiled on RH8. I just tried installing it on RH8 and it failed a dependency: libwx_gtk-2.3.so.2. Welcome to dependency hell.
If I can find this library, I don’t know enough about Linux to know what will happen if I install this. Will anything break?
so i dont know what the performance would be like optimized for the machine its running on… but have played quite a bit with bochs…
the pre-release 2.0 thing i tried seems to be .. MUCH faster than 1.4 (although still dog slow compared to a vm like virtual pc or vmware) but also the configuration seems to have gotten harder and more complex rather than easier…
bochs as compared to a vm solution will be a much different experience because its full emulation… not virtualized (i believe the author had porting to many different architectures in mind)… but someone may eventally port it to unusual systems
plex86 has been mentioned on here a couple times .. does anyone know its status?
the savannah project doesnt seem very active these days (I havent actually done a check out from the cvs recently to check though)
Hi,
I’ve tried both regular FAT-based B5PE, and Max 2.1. In both instances, the console output on boot reports 13MHz (my machine is an AMD Athlon Thunderbird @ 1GHz, and I have no regular tasks on my background.) Both hang on “sysinit2: 23”. I think it may be something with the ISA (vs. PCI) structure delivered by Bochs. Haven’t tried anything beyond 2.0pre2 though.
Having used Bochs since v0.x days, it has come a long way (haven’t tried v2.0 yet though). On the issue of speed, the x86 was never designed to emulate virtual cpu’s, so bochs’ performance will never be stellar. From personal experience, I would get an emulated environment of about 5-10% the speed of the host system, (ie on P233MMX, the emulated speed was about 10MHz).
Since I am a geek, whose programming his own OS, the usability is good for *my* purpose, ie a fully integrated debugger, or the option just to run it. I do acknowledge setting it up is harder than it should be, but for anyone using it on a *nix, shouldn’t have a problem understanding and editting the .boshrc file. (that just comes with the terroritory).
plex86 has been mentioned on here a couple times .. does anyone know its status?
I thought Plex86 died? But wasn’t Kevin working for Mandrake at some stage? Might have something to do with it dying?
The Bochs project is looking for a dedicated developer to maintain the Mac port of bochs which will be roughly up to speed in a day or so. I hope there is a willing volunteer out there. Contact the bochs team if you wish to help.
P
>> “According to the bochs website, this “pre2″ version was compiled on RH8. I just tried installing it on RH8 and it failed a dependency: libwx_gtk-2.3.so.2. Welcome to dependency hell.”
lol, if you call that dependency hell, then you haven’t ever seen a REAL dependency hell..
>> “If I can find this library, I don’t know enough about Linux to know what will happen if I install this. Will anything break?”
As mentioned on their site (it’s not an official release btw, keep that in mind too) you’ll need wxWindows.
You can download wxWindows from http://www.wxwindows.org
Get the latest unstable version, or get a CVS snapshot (downloadable on their pages, you won’t have to execute all kinds of weird cvs commands for that), and install it using the following instructions:
tar xvzf nameoffile.tar.gz
cd nameoffile
./configure –prefix=/usr
make
su -c “make install”
<type your root password>
Voila!
As for Win2k over Bochs, it is possible. There are efforts to have XP work correctly (works up to login screen)
As for the speed, OF COURSE it is much slower than VMWare; remember anyway that VMWare requires an IA32 processor, and soon there IA32 will be officially dropped by Intel.
Bochs allows anyone with a computer to run IA32 software, be that Alpha, VAX, PPC or whatever.
Code speed is less relevant than compatibility. There are still some compatibility issues, but there are efforts to speed things up, too!
And, Bochs costs definitely less than VMWare
As for the configuration, making it easy is one of the goals. Just leave the poor guys some more time
Can I use Bochs to play my old VGA games with Bochs? A reduction in speed/performance is just what I need to be able to play Comanche2, Zone66, and some others like that. Those slowdown programs never did work right. The games of that era just run too fast, even back when I had that 6x86L-150, lol. Now I have a T-Bird 700.
A nice AMD 486-120 computer is what I really want, but if somebody here thinks Bochs will run those old VGA games fullscreen with sound, I will surely try it.
The old plex86.org site is gone.
Please go here:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/plex86/
Old games should work, but I think the emulator is too slow to run anything that needs fast screen redraw (like Zone66, which is a pretty heavy requirements game). Maybe you’ll have luck with something like Scorched Earth. Have you tried DOSbox? http://dosbox.zophar.net/ Please note that this will not run protected mode games, like Zone66.
(From the site: “DOSBox doesn’t run any protected mode games, stop bothering us about those. In general this will mean games coming out after 1993, you can recognize most since they have DOS4GW.EXE in the game directory.”).
DOSBox looks really cool. I will have to follow its development- maybe I will be able to have all my games in one machine after all soon. I might even have to try to (shudder) compile it later on. Imagine… Commodore games, Nintendo games, DOS games, Windows and Linux games