Bochs 2.0 x86 emulator was released today with many new features and support for MMX/SSE/SSE2 and more modern operating systems in graphics mode.
Bochs 2.0 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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How good is this when compared to the commercial ones? Say VMWare, Win4Lin etc. Is it as fast as them, is it slower or is it faster?
It’s not really fair to compare Bochs to things like VMWare. VMWare runs on x86 machines, and passes instructions from the virtual machine down to the actual hardware.
Bochs on the other hand, emulates every single x86 instruction in software. This allows it to run on any platform with a C++ compiler. For example, Bochs could emulate a 86 on a Macintosh, a SPARCStation, or even a Cray. VMWare can’t do this.
The fact that it emulates every instruction, means that it is very very slow.
If you have a x86 box, use VMWare or something like that. If you don’t have an x86 box, then Bochs might be a good choice. They really don’t do the same thing, so direct speed comparisons are a bit useless.
maybe I don’t see the point – it says it can emulate 386, 486 and Pentium (P I, I suppose) – so where do they get the SSE / SSE2 from? On a side note, you can compare apples + oranges – out come the differences between the two. People who claim the opposite only show that they don’t like the outcome…
On a side note, you can compare apples + oranges – out come the differences between the two. People who claim the opposite only show that they don’t like the outcome…
Umm.. yeah sure you can compare them, but your wasting your time and doing something completely useless.
Bochs is great for hobby OS’s because if your trying to test out an OS and you only have a single machine, you get the closest thing to an actual machien emulated. Bochs isn’t aimed at running Windows XP in a Window in the background while your running Linux.
Your comment made no sense, he clearly answered somebody’s question and made a valid point and you made yourself look rather foolish with your response.
Boch’s is more of a development tool for programmers than it is a toy.
Jbett: Exactly. Bochs is an emulator, VMware is not (this is why Bochs can be ported in any architecture, while VMWare only runs on x86). The good thing of VMWare is that it will always be faster than Bochs (this is why VMWare and VirtualPC are most suited to run apps professionally on the guest OSes, while Bochs is better suited if you want to run x86 OSes on other platforms, or for development), because VMWare simply, doesn’t emulate things (at least not most of the time).
Anyone knows if you can run Bochs with the latest Red Hat 8? I am on my brother’s PC these days, and he doesn’t have more partitions for me to install RH for him (and he doesn’t want me to touch his partition table
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You always post the best stories, you will be missed.
Slow? I wonder how slow it is. Can anyone tried explain further? Will a P4 2.5 Ghz runs like a 300Mhz P3?
RedHat 8 should work fine in Bochs, but very slowly. Fine for shells though. Your best bet, i think is to buy an old 5GB hdd and use that (probably about $10) or use Knoppix.
> Slow? I wonder how slow it is. Can anyone tried explain
> further? Will a P4 2.5 Ghz runs like a 300Mhz P3?
Don’t be that optimistic.
Bochs is *REALLY SLOW*. Maybe you’re lucky and you can achieve the speed of a 486.
Bochs on my Duron is so slow, it feels like 5 MHz.
@Eugenia:
I suggest that you use the trial version of VMware. If you don’t have to use you brother’s PC for longe than a month, it will be OK.
I want to leave Linux installed for my brother, not for myself. So I can’t use the VMWare trial on his PC (I own VMWare 3 anyway, but only for my personal usage).
Could be this:
An emulator so that we can still play the old dos games.
I have a lot of old games that I like to play, it is just getting harder to find replacement parts for old pc’s these days.
I have to try it out, anyone here ever tried it?
“The good thing of VMWare is that it will always be faster than Bochs (this is why VMWare and VirtualPC are most suited to run apps professionally on the guest OSes, while Bochs is better suited if you want to run x86 OSes on other platforms, or for development)”
I thought VirtualPC was an emulator just like bochs? Has things changed ?
> I thought VirtualPC was an emulator just like bochs?
> Has things changed ?
The Mac version of VPC is simmilar to Bochs (it emulates the CPU), while the Windows version of VPC does not emulate the CPU (just like VMware).
While the Mac version is similar to Bochs, it’s still a lot faster. The only reason I use Bochs on my Mac is because it is a lot easier to use for hobby OS development since it is easier to coax it into booting a larger variety of operating systems while Virtual PC crashed a lot mor often. So if you want to run Windows, use Virtual PC.
Bochs is about 200 times slower than actual hardware.
It’s great for programmers since it may be configured to do many different things (be 486, Pentium II or Athalon64, UP or SMP etc). It’s still not perfect thus I would not suggest it to people who are not very technical, but it’s getting better and soon it may become more useful to general public.
VMWare virtualizes hardware, while in general, code is being translated natively, so biggest performance hit comes from I/O operations and (in case of workstation) inability to allow guest OS directly manipulate TLB. Bochs people are planning to add optional native translation which would make tool much faster when host computer is x86.
VMWare is commerical product and quality of VMWare is far better than one that could be afforded by bochs team. However, as bochs is getting better I expect more developers to get involved and slowly bochs is probably going to come very close to VMWare workstation.
VMWare ESX server is very different from workstation product and bochs people did not even try to move in that direction. [ESX is sort of VM (as in VM/370) for x86, but very clever. I don’t think that there in an alternative to ESX offered by anyone, be it commercial or amature.
How does Bochs compare to the übercool Simics?
I just took a course in computer architecture where we did our own cache implementation (sort of) using Simics, damn cool (although a bit too easy).
http://www.simics.com/
Simics is what bochs is aiming for.
Simics is able to emulate computer network clusters and SMP. (Bochs SMP is still buggy) It’s commercial quality code, while bochs is still amature. Simics supports many different architectures while bochs support only x86[ and now x86-64 extentions].
However, bochs is free and available along with source while simics is quite an expensive tool closed source tool.
now if only they could fix the inability to boot of floppy images on the alpha arch i could maybe make use of it. Until then, good ol’ bochs 1.3 for me.
Does anyone know what would be required to get BeOS 5 running as a guest OS? It doesn’t work at the moment so I’m assuming some code changes are required
I use Win4Lin 3.x to run windows 98 SE2 in Linux. Performance and stability are good. (Though windows can still crash, Win4Lin will display the BSOD and exit without crashing Linux.)
Only limitations are in Direct X and special hardware. But it’s good enough to run most office and network applications.
Doesn’t run NT, but version 4 runs ME and international versions of Windows.
It WILL run with remote X sessions, which is a fantastic feature Netraverse should consider exploiting given the popularity of CodeWeavers WINE server/project.
It also avoids virtual disks, meaning it uses Linux’s native file system in the user’s home directory, allowing you to easily move files to/from the windows environment.
Support is also excellent, my questions/problems were solved quickly, and they keep up with the latest kernel patches and updates are easily downloaded when installing.
Knowing how to replace binary kernels or building your own kernel is a requirement…
I simply recommend it for people wanting Windows support within Linux.
As a note to the poster who asked about old DOS games: I once tried running Ultima 7 (AWFUL memory management/requirements) in Bochs. It worked! There’s even a customized version of Bochs available that builds everything from scratch just to run Ultima 7. My PII450 ran at about the same speed as my 386sx20 did back then, but the game was certainly playable. I tried this approach probably more than a year ago, so progress must have been made in this area.
If you want to run old dos game/apps under linux/win2k try dosbox, it won’t run protected mode games but it’s great for things like LemmingS, leisure suite larry etc
http://dosbox.zophar.net/
Bochs is damnd slow on Athlonxp+ 2000, How it will be with ver 2.0, must see…