After a whole year, here is a new version for Bochs, v2.1. It sports a new disassembler, 3DNow!/SSE/SSE2/PNI instruction support, Vmware3/Sparse/Undoable/Growing harddisk images support, many VGA emulation improvements (e.g. high/true color VBE modes added), no more X11 vga font required etc. I tried Bochs 2.1 last night on my Mac OS X Panther but it couldn’t read any of my VMWare 3.x images (I tried Syllable and Plan9) saying something to the effect of “VMWare COW Disk images are invalid” and while the ata0 mode was set correctly to “vmware3” in the .bochsrc file.
Bochs 2.1 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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But does it support virtualization of the x86? Bochs is sloooooooooow. I thought they were going to integrate the remains Plex into it?
How good is this release of Bochs? Is it possible to run Windows at a reasonable speed with this release?
I don’t think so. I also ran last night the Bochs-offered Linux image (4 MB Linux image, text mode) and it was very slow. On my Powerbook G4 867 Mhz/768 MB RAM I could see my text getting typed by me almost lagging. I really didn’t see any big speed improvements on Bochs 2.1 compared to 2.0.2 (at least not visible enough), so I do not expect any graphical OS to perform adequately on normal hardware (normal: 700 Mhz to 2.6 GHz).
Virtual PC on the other hand runs “extremely” fast on my other Mac (for an emulator that is). I ran Windows98 on the 450 Mhz G4 Cube, which is already twice slower than my Powerbook mentioned above and Win98 was absolutely usable. Bochs has a lot of catch up to do IMHO, in many areas.
There are some parameters in the config file you can change to speed it up.
The last version was really a great thing I thought. There is some need to actually read and understand what is needed. There really is a great need to make more modern images. Yes, if you have a 5 year old computer it will be very slow. It was almost as much fun and functional as the VirtalPC5.2 eval. Bochs could use some smart people helping to get to a 3.0 version soon! (hint)
Well I’m not complaining about performance as functionality is more important to me. Even moreso because Bochs is free. I don’t really see the point about VMware (in)compatibility. If you already have VMware, why would you want to use Bochs?
I already have VMware, but not all users have VMWare. VMWare images are freely available on the web (e.g. Syllable and Plan9) while they are not available for Bochs, so people might download those in order to run them on Bochs.
Besides, for Mac users this is very important, as VMWare can’t run on anything than x86.
@Eugenia:
That sucks then. I was looking forward to being able to run Win98SE at a reasonable speed. Looks like I might have to try tweaking it further or buy Virtual PC.
@Al Hartman
What flags/parameters are you talking about? Where would I find information on them?
I too am interested in what is happening with Plex integration.
Eugenia wrote…
Virtual PC on the other hand runs “extremely” fast on my other Mac (for an emulator that is). I ran Windows98 on the 450 Mhz G4 Cube, which is already twice slower than my Powerbook mentioned above and Win98 was absolutely usable. Bochs has a lot of catch up to do IMHO, in many areas.
Maybe you could run a benchmark app on it
I’ve yet to even get anything working Bochs. Even after reading the docs I was only able to get the included images working. I guess its just me, but compared to installing any nix or even setting up AD bochs just seemed like a pain in the ass. This is especially true compared to what Vmware provides. Yes I know the difference between what vmware does and what bochs does, and yes I know vmware costs money. At least with vmware I can easily install any os and apps.
Anyone know if BeOS will run under Boch ? just curious …
Surely if they structured the source in such a way as CPU emulation could be “pluggable” then you could have a software x86 CPU, a virtualised x86 CPU (using Plex code) etc. Then people on other platforms could run the software CPU and those of us with existing x86 can run at an acceptable speed.
I read about a year ago they were working on integrating Plex to handle non-privilaged instructions natively. Anyone know what happened with that?
I have visited the Plex homepage the other day. It seems that they changed their goals and now their objective is to virtualize Linux (no other Oses emulation).
has eny really good signifigent enhancements been made in this release?
I doubt Bochs will be comparable to Virtual PC anytime soon when it comes to speed.
Bochs is a pure emulator, and everything is handled with software, as any regular emulator does.
Virtual PC doesn’t actually run like this. When Virtual PC spots a block of windows machine code to be run, it will dynamically recompile/binary translate the block of code, then store it in the system’s cache. If it gets run again, its already translated in the cache. In effect, Virtual PC will translate everything and run it natively, in a sort of virtualization.
And virtualizations will always run faster than emulators.
Someone should release some usable config files.
Yes, BeOS does run with a bit of work.
As for Plex… the author of Plex(Kevin Lawton IIRC) did modify it and Bochs to a certain extent so that they worked together on a x86 computer. Basically, Bochs emulated any non-ring3(ring3 is generally used for apps) stuff, and plex handled ring3 stuff. So you had the kernel running on Bochs’ emulation, and apps running straight on the CPU.
Thing is… Kevin only got this working on Linux, and only with Linux. It was a “proof of concept” more or less. Awhile back, someone asked on the developers list if Kevin would do anything else with this, and he said if there is /funding/ he would consider it.
Last time I tried, Plex was even slower than Bochs…
I’ve just tried Syllable 0.4.5 booted from floppy disks on Bochs 2.1 (Running on Windows 2000, Dell Dimension 4100 which is a 1.1Ghz P3 w/256Mb if I remember correctly)
Syllable will now boot to the GUI under Bochs if you use the LGPL VGA BIOS (The Elpin BIOS doesn’t appear to support any VBE modes). It is predictably slow. I mean using 640×480 16bit video (As low as Syllable will go) it is typewriter-slow. You can see each character being blited to the screen. Far to slow to be useful. Anyone who tried Syllable with Jan’s original hack of Bochs 2.0 ( http://www.uridabasch.de/syllable/ ) will know how slow it was; Bochs 2.1 isn’t any faster.
Shame really. I guess unless I suddenly get a quad AthlonFX 3700 machine I’ll not be running Syllable in Bochs any time soon.
* Chose the right tool.
* Don’t use a screwdriver as a hammer.
* Stop complaining about Bochs not catching up with VMware.
Bochs and VMware are two very different beasties.
Personally, I use Bochs for kernel development work, and I very much enjoy not having to do a hard reboot with every build cycle. I also like using the additional debug capabilities of Bochs, which save me much headache. Having more instruction set extensions at my disposal is certainly a win for me, and I couldn’t care less for VMware compatibility, or even speed.
So for me, thanks for Bochs. Who’s VMware, anyway?
I use Bochs to run Agenda under DOS. Works great for me