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Bochs x86 IA-32 Emulator 2.1 Released 216

Posted by michael 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."
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Bochs x86 IA-32 Emulator 2.1 Released More

Bochs x86 IA-32 Emulator 2.1 Released

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  • Bochs is not like VMWare (Score:5, Informative)

    by enosys ( 705759 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @01:36AM (#8156204) Homepage
    Bochs is not like VMWare.

    Bochs emulates the IA-32 instruction set and enables you to run IA-32 software on any sort of hardware that you can compile Bochs on. (eg. I once ran it on a MicroVAX at an incredibly slow speed)

    VMWare requires IA-32 hardware. Most of the instructions are executed natively and only some of the priviledged operations are emulated so that whatever is run under VMWare can work as if it has full control over the CPU while in fact being an un-priviledged task.

    • (eg. I once ran it on a MicroVAX at an incredibly slow speed)

      Heck, native code on a MicroVAX runs at an incredibly slow speed. An IA32 emulation must be positively glacial.
    • Actually, read the posting again.

      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.

      You're just placing the parentheses wrong. Grammatically, this says that Bochs is two things:
      • open source implementation of the x86 instruction set(s)
      • virtual PC (al [sic] la VMWare)
      This is quite true.

    • Yeah (Score:3, Informative)

      by Crazy Eight ( 673088 )
      Plex86 is the VMware alternative.
  • Nice! I haven't checked tried it out yet, but if its speed is comparable to VMWare, then it's yet another step towards Windipendence. I use Linux 80% of the time, but I find myself returning to Windows for two things. 3dsMAX and Adobe stuff. The latest versions of either of which don't run in WINE, unfortunately enough. I think I'll give Bochs a try.

    • Re:Yay. (Score:2, Informative)

      by antoinjapan ( 450229 )
      unfortunately having tried both bochs and vmware recently I can tell you its orders of magnitude slower than vmware due to it emulating everything whereas vmware uses the actual processor in the machine.

    • Bochs is not your answer (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gotr00t ( 563828 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @01:46AM (#8156250) Journal
      Bochs is actually an emulator for an IA32 system, and though it has support for some Windows operating systems, don't expect to be able to do much with it, because its intent was not really to run windows programs on Linux and other OSes.

      Many others have already posted this, but VMware != Bochs, because VMware uses virtulization to run a guest OS with minor overhead on a host system. Bochs, on the other hand, emulates everything, even if the host system is IA32, causing massive performance degredation. I see that your applications are rather large scale(3DSMAX and Adobe applications) - and probably would rely heavily on graphics adaptor and memory. Bochs is definately not your answer, as if you could even get it to work, it would be so incredibly slow that you'll forget why you were doing it in the first place before the program even loads (trust me, it has happened before).

      Look to VMware to do things like this - it may have a fee attached, but its fast and capable, but not open source.

  • capable of running serious OSes as well (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 02, 2004 @01:39AM (#8156218)
    Bochs isn't just capable of running DOS clones:

    Operating Systems inside the emulation including Linux, Windows(R) 95, DOS, and Windows(R) NT 4

    It can also run Windows 2000 - and probably XP as well if product activation works.

  • Bochs needs to be re-boxed. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 0x1337 ( 659448 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @01:39AM (#8156221)
    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.

  • Bochs is painfuly slow (Score:5, Informative)

    by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) ( 613870 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @01:55AM (#8156286) Journal
    But if it's retro DOS games you're after check out dosbox [sourceforge.net] which runs pretty fast and runs on many platforms.
    • Pretty fast? I have a dual Athlon 1.2Ghz and I can't even run point'n'click-adventures like Kings Quest 6 and Willy Beamish in Dosbox without having the sound stuttering and everything is painfully slow, even when there are almost no graphics-updates on the screen at all...
      The idea is very nice though, I just wish they could add (optional) VMWare/DOSEmu-like virtualization instead of emulating every single component of the system...

      I really like the fact that I can do things like $ dosbox /path/to/dos/gam
      • Sorry for replying to myself, I just had to correct myself on a few things.
        I just tried the recently released version 1.2.0 of DOSEmu and it seems to work WAY better than the 1.0.x-versions I had tried before... Now if they just add adlib-emulation so we can get some music and I'm happy! ;) Still not as easy as dosbox /path/to/program.exe, you still have to start the emulator, cd to the directory and run it, but at least it works now, and it's WAY faster than Dosbox on x86 machines...

      • I just wish they could add (optional) VMWare/DOSEmu-like virtualization instead of emulating every single component of the system...

        For those of us running OSX this is the only way to go as every single component is missing from my hardware! But yes, the thing that really sold me was the ease of use. I've spent many a merry hour trying to configure Bochs's config files only to have it find another obscure reason not to run. dosbox appears to be truly zero config!

        One fun thing is that I have the saved st

      • Dosbox's sound mixers are very correct but yes - they're horribly slow. I'm working on an MMX assembly version which preliminary testing shows to be roughly 100 times faster thanks to a little reorganisation of the data and processing 4 samples at a time with the saturation ops.
        I had this complaint with dosbox too but I worked out its real CPU requirements based on what it's emulating and it's much higher than I first thought: VGA + 386 + peripherals + decent sound card like an Ultrasound adds up to a frigh
        • Interresting! So Dosbox's sound emulation is that much a bottleneck? Are we going to see your code in 0.62? ;)

          BTW, frameskip of 4 is usually just too noticable for me.. If I have to use frameskip of more than 2 I consider the game unplayable, it's too annoying...
          • Interresting! So Dosbox's sound emulation is that much a bottleneck?

            Proof coming soon :)

            Are we going to see your code in 0.62? ;)

            As soon as it works 100% - strange clipping bug when I run ImpulseTracker and some old DOS demos :(
    • But if it's retro DOS games you're after check out dosbox which runs pretty fast and runs on many platforms.

      Uh, the biggest problem I've had with getting old games to run is making the VM *slow* enough, not fast enough...

  • Speaking of emulation, OT like mad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Monday February 02, 2004 @02:03AM (#8156329) Journal
    Would the advent of the 64-bit Athlon mean that a PowerPC chip could finally be emulated?

    I know that in the past, the number of registers of the PPC was far in excess of the capabillities of the x86. Example: No PPC emulator yet exists, no matter what vaporware merchants have said in the past.

    Finally, my one experience with Bochs was on BeOS. I couldn't figure it out. On the other hand, Virtual PC was easy as pie. Why doesn't Bochs copy the usabillity of Virtual PC --- the gui is neat and clean, plenty of options; throw open source in the mix and we could have a weiner. (And a real alternative to MS owned, newly activation-coded Virtual PC.)

    I stopped upgrading when MS bought it. It was only fair.

    • Re:Speaking of emulation, OT like mad (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, PPC emulation on x86 has been added to SheepShaver [beauchesne.free.fr] by Gwenole Beauchesne [beauchesne.free.fr]. Currently its only for Linux and can run up to Mac OS 8.6 with support for some new world roms. More info here [emaculation.com].
    • Would the advent of the 64-bit Athlon mean that a PowerPC chip could finally be emulated?

      Completely unrelated. You could probably write a PowerPC emulator for a 386 if you wanted to. Extra registers may (or may not) make the emulator a bit faster, but that's all. If there's no PPC emulator yet, it's probably because nobody cared to write one.

      • Re:Speaking of emulation, OT like mad (Score:5, Interesting)

        by brion ( 1316 ) * on Monday February 02, 2004 @02:57AM (#8156526) Homepage
        QEMU [bellard.free.fr] 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.

    • The main reason a PPC emulator doesn't exist (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @02:45AM (#8156496)
      Is lack of demand. Registers aren't relivant. It is a fact of a turing machine that any one can emulate any other. An x86 chip is perfectly capable of emulating a PPC chip. Now it might end up being slow (due to registeres needing to be in memory), but it would work fine. I actually have a feeling you could get it working pretty well. The 32 "general purpose" registers on a PPC actually aren't, many of them have specific tasks, and the number of registers actually on an x86 chip is not related to the number exposed by the ISA.

      However, regardless, you can make an emulator. You can make an emulator in 100% C or Perl or Java if you like, and one that is portable to any platform. It needn't be anything low level. It'd be slow, but it'd work just fine.

      Basically what it comes down to, is who wants a PPC emulator? I mean if you want a PPC system, get one. There are plenty available from IBM for reasonable prices. If it's Mac emulation you are looking at, well that's a problem. The Mac ROMs are not available outside of Mac hardware, nor is the OS, and without those, it is useless. So to run the emulator, someone would need a legit copy of the ROMs and OS, meaning they'd need to own a Mac. Well if you own the hardware an emulator is worthless.

      x86 emulation on the Mac is of much more intrest. First off, it's actually feasable to do. PC BIOS is easy to license from a number of manufacturers, and MS is happy to sell copies of Windows, even for virtual machines. Also there are cases where you have a Mac and 99% of what you do is done natively but there is the ONE app that you need for something that is Windows only. So you get an emulator. Well the only Mac only apps I can think of are things like Final Cut Pro, which would run like shit in an emulator, so you'll have native hardware if you want to use it.

      • Re:The main reason a PPC emulator doesn't exist (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The 32 "general purpose" registers on a PPC actually aren't, many of them have specific tasks, and the number of registers actually on an x86 chip is not related to the number exposed by the ISA.

        I'd like to know which are not general purpose among the register son PPC. From the hardware point of view, register 0 is a bit special since it can't be used as a base register for addressing (and related instruction like effective address computation) but all the other are identical, i.e., the instruction set

      • Not really (Score:5, Informative)

        by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Monday February 02, 2004 @05:14AM (#8156872) Homepage
        It is a fact of a turing machine that any one can emulate any other

        It is a fact that they can. However that does not mean that it will be easy.

        It'd be slow, but it'd work just fine.

        This is exactly the problem: it would be slow. And up until a certain point, it's slow enough you might as well not do it at all. No, there's no commercial demand for PPC emulation on x86; there
        doesn't really need to be. People write emulators just because they can. Do you think there is any "demand" for an emulator for the Amstrad CPC [emuunlim.com]? In the meantime, there's some hobbyist demand from people who are "curious" about OS X; there's the guarantee of instant infamy for anyone who succeeds. People have really tried, put a lot of effort into trying to, emulate the PPC on an x86. I've never seen anyone succeed. As it turns out, though, writing a PPC emulator that runs on the x86 just happens to be unbelievably difficult to do with anything even remotely approaching an acceptable speed of emulation due to the neatly mismatching design philosophies of the two instruction sets. Yeah, if there was a real commercial *NEED* for someone to emulate, an acceptable emulator could probably be created. But the issue is a little more complicated than "oh, no one wants it".

        If it's Mac emulation you are looking at, well that's a problem. The Mac ROMs are not available outside of Mac hardware, nor is the OS, and without those, it is useless. So to run the emulator, someone would need a legit copy of the ROMs and OS, meaning they'd need to own a Mac. Well if you own the hardware an emulator is worthless.

        Not only is this not the hard part, this is the part that has already been solved. Modern macintoshes no longer have anything significant in ROM. The ROM is just a tiny kickstart thing and the OS is booted entirely using the openly documented Open Firmware protocol. This part is a non-issue.

        Since the internals of an apple machine aren't that public, virtualizing the hardware might be a little bit difficult.. but, well, not that difficult, as practically all of the work has already been done for you in the form of the mac-on-linux [maconlinux.org] project, a VMWare-like virtual machine for macintosh hardware that will let you boot OS X within a virtual machine on top of Linux. I am uncertain how much extra work needs to be done on top of that when emulating on the PC platform since I don't know what the internals of mac-on-linux look like. However, at the very least, the hardest and most voodoo-y part, actually getting it to boot, has already been done.

        As far as the OS goes, you can buy a copy of the Mac OS without buying an actual mac. As in, you can go to a store and buy a copy of Mac OS X 10.3 in a box. This is not unrealistic; just because someone is emulating doesn't mean they aren't willing to actually buy the OS. Case in point, everyone who emulates Windows on the Mac does in fact actually have to buy a copy of Windows.

        BTW, just out of curiousity, where are these PPC systems which you say are "available from IBM for reasonable prices"? I may just be going about it wrong, but I'm looking at IBM's website and the cheapest POWER-based system I can find is nearly $6000.
        • Not to mention that 68k mac emulation is just about perfect (and fast!) in the shape of basilisk II [uni-mainz.de]. I've used it to play around with macos 8. So it's really emulating the ppc that's the problem, not the rom, or the other various bits of hardware (which was a lot more exotic on 68k macs than on ppc macs).
        • [W]riting a PPC emulator that runs on the x86 just happens to be unbelievably difficult to do with anything even remotely approaching an acceptable speed of emulation due to the neatly mismatching design philosophies of the two instruction sets.

          Sooo...why does the PPC do a fair job of emulating an x86 then? I have VirtualPC on my 1.25 DP G4; it only uses ~60% [of *one* proc] when it's going full-tilt, yet it feels about as fast as my PIII-800 at my last job. Not screaming bleeding-edge fast, but perfectly
          • Perhaps I should have been more clear. What I mean is that the contrasting design decisions of the PPC and x86 make it very very easy to emulate x86 on PPC and very difficult to go the other way around. Here are the reasons why.

            This is a vast oversimplification, but when you are emulating you want two things. First off, you want it to be easy to efficiently rephrase the source instruction set into the target instruction set. Second off, you want to be able to hold all the emulated registers in hardware reg
            • This is just plain ridiculous. If anything, emulating a PPC on another platform is easier than emulating an x86. Why? Because the x86 instruction set is psychopathic. It's like it was designed by sadists. Ugh.

              The PPC instruction set it pretty simple in comparison. It's easy to understand. It's easy to emulate.

              Saying it's "hard" because it might be slow is all nice and good, but that's not hard. That's just slow. Actually writing a functional emulator is not (in comparison) hard. It's just kind o
        • As far as the OS goes, you can buy a copy of the Mac OS without buying an actual mac. As in, you can go to a store and buy a copy of Mac OS X 10.3 in a box.

          You can buy it, but just remember it isn't legal to *run* it on anything except Apple hardware.

    • There is a Sega Model 3 arcade hardware emulator in development [system16.com]. That hardware uses a PowerPC 603 or 603ev CPU at speeds ranging between 66 and 166 MHz. I can assure you the emulator is real.

      PPC hasn't been emulated previously because there hasn't been any demand for it.

    • Re:Speaking of emulation, OT like mad (Score:5, Interesting)

      by brion ( 1316 ) * on Monday February 02, 2004 @04:53AM (#8156807) Homepage
      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 [bellard.free.fr]'s interesting capabilities and much greater speed [bellard.free.fr]. 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).

    • No PPC emulator yet exists, no matter what vaporware merchants have said in the past.

      The Nintendo GameCube has a PPC CPU (Gecko, a modified G3). Currently there are two GC emulators. One called Dolphin and the other called Dolwin. Both are far away from being perfect, but both emulators emulate the CPU so well that some games boot.
    • What the fudge are you talking about? There's been an PPC mac emulator out for a while now. It's the x86 Linux port of SheepShaver. It emulates a G3 mac at good speeds on my Athlon XP 2700+ but can only run up to MacOS 8.6.

  • If you want free VMWare check out Xen (Score:5, Interesting)

    by enosys ( 705759 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @02:06AM (#8156336) Homepage
    If you want free VMWare [vmware.com] check out Xen [cam.ac.uk]. 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 [slashdot.org]

  • Bochs is... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by simrook ( 548769 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @02:07AM (#8156341)
    great for OS Systems development, but not much more. If you are programming an operating system, there is nothing better then Bochs running with gdb debugging stubs. Peroid. All this talk "Bochs can't run photoshop at a good speed" and "Bochs takes for ever to load windows" is bulljive. Of course it does, because that's not the point! Why do I own a 386 and use it with DOS 6.22? Because I want to do assembly programming and test out algorithms written in IA32 assembly. If I tried to run PS 8 and WinXP on it and subsequently complained about the speeds, I'd be flamed to death. The same goes for bochs. Kudos to the developers! A lot of great improvements were put into this release, everything from 3D assembly instructions to a whole new disassembler. Bochs is every OS Developer's dream come true. And it's just gettin' better... (Also, the best "bug fix" imho is that you don't need an extra font installed in X-Windows now). And if you want to emulate windows and have it run fast, go buy a $400 PC from Walmart. They play quake fine while waiting for the latest kernel to compile. :-> - Simrook

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @02:16AM (#8156385)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Check out qemu (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lsd ( 36021 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @02:20AM (#8156403) Homepage
    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 [bellard.free.fr]. 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.

  • Bochs vs. VMWare vs. Plex86 background (Score:5, Informative)

    by arrianus ( 740942 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @02:22AM (#8156414)
    This post has no point. It just provides some general (hopefully interesting) background info.

    As many people pointed out, Bochs is an x86 emulator, rather than a virtualization system like VMWare. Emulation means that you have a representation of an x86 machine in memory, look at each instruction, and change the representation appropriately. Virtualization means the code runs on the actual CPU natively, and uses 386 ninja powers to intercept all I/O calls and reroute them to the base OS.

    As a result, Bochs will run on any platform. VMWare will only run on x86. Bochs is slow enough to be useless for most common uses (a bit over a 100x hit in speed). VMWare has almost no hit in speed.

    However, the free software community did have a project that attempted to reimplement VMWare. That project was called Plex86 (http://plex86.sourceforge.net/). For reasons that I do not know, Plex86 recently reinvented itself not to do full hardware virtualization -- rather, it does not implement the I/O layer, and instead provides special drivers for Linux to talk to its I/O layer. As a result, it can only run Linux (although it claims to run it reasonably well). They may implement drivers for other platforms, but I would be fairly sceptical of any real Windows support anytime soon. That seems a lot less useful now...

    The Plex86 project, however, claims the possibility of using their virtualization technology in conjunction with Bochs to make a useable system: "There is the potential to use plex86 as an accelerator for bochs, as was demonstrated some time ago." (source: Plex86 FAQ). Likewise, it seems that if Bochs was more intelligently implemented, they could use just-in-time recompliation, a la Java or Transmeta, since they are effectively treating the x86 ISA as bytecode. That would be in the very, very distant future, but if either of these is implemented, the Bochs project is not as hopeless for end-user use as it may at first seem... Either or both of these technologies ought to give reasonable performance.

    One problem is that VMWare is creating a patent minefield in front of Plex86 and Bochs. I am not familiar with all of the patents, but from what I've heard, they've got a pretty wide field of IP cut out. I'm not sure how hard they'll exploit it, since the people working there seem like nice guys, and understand the whole open/Linux/GNU/free/etc. thing. On the other hand, so did Caldera a few years back, and VMWare is definitely getting those patents for a reason....

    One final point -- properly used, emulators like Bochs can provide amazingly powerful debugging tools. You can run a full x86 machine (admittedly at very slow speeds), but grab snapshots of the system memory at different points. You can then roll back, use a capture of all inputs to roll forward, etc.
    • Two additional (useless) trivia:

      1) Bochs & Plex86 are written by the same guy (well, the main developer of both is the same guy).

      2) Plex86 used to be called FreeMWare.
    • I suspect the future of emulation/virtualization environments will resemble dynamic translation projects like HP's Dynamo as described here [arstechnica.com]. Unfortunately, HP's papers [hp.com] on this project [hp.com] are from 1999, so there doesn't appear to be much activity lately. Anyway, combining something like Dynamo with a virtualization environment would allow non-native applications to run without the excessive overhead of Bochs. In theory.
    • VMWare Question ...

      VMWare does not need to "emulate" the x86 (am I correct) the only thing it emulates is the hardware eg graphics cards etc. This is great for speed on x86 machines. But means that its not possible to port to ppc or other architectures without building an x86 emulation componont.

      Is there an open-source PC emulator (not plex) that works in a similar way?

      nick...

  • Virtualization... (Score:5, Informative)

    by fnord123 ( 748158 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @02:33AM (#8156457)
    Bochs isn't meant to be a high performance virtualization, as other posters have already clarified.

    Plex86 (and Xen, VMware, and Connectix, and Ensim, and others) are the things people should look at if they want fast virtualization of x86. The trouble all these technologies run into is that IO has to go through the "host" OS (the one actually running on the metal) - often popping into userspace to do it (read: context & ring switches --> slow!). This is necessary in order to allow multiple virtualized OS's to share the IO devices. This causes stuff that is IO intensive (games, compilers, databases, etc.) take a fairly serious performance hit. Interestingly enough, Intel is working on building this sort of capability in the chips directly - check out Vanderpool [linuxworld.com] for instance. I don't know if AMD is doing anything similar, anybody heard anything?

    • Xen has no host OS and it provides very efficient I/O (check the SOSP paper). So not all virtualization is alike.

      Vanderpool is vaporware for now; Intel hasn't described exactly what it is or how it works, so it's impossible to draw any intelligent conclusions about it.

  • what would be the limit ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 02, 2004 @03:10AM (#8156558)
    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...

  • XP on X-Box (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 02, 2004 @04:00AM (#8156664)
    Finally, now I can install windows XP on my xbox!

    (XP on Bochs on linux on xbox)

  • DOSEMU (Score:2, Informative)

    by hsa ( 598343 )
    Now that you mention it, http://dosemu.sourceforge.net/stable/announce-1.2. 0.html [slashdot.org] is out. It's the PC Emulator for x86 based Linux.
  • I actually installed this full-range x86 emulator on Linux and then installed Win95 on it.
    Aside from the fact that Win95 does a bazillion low level operations that all have to be emulated, Bochs itself really is _s_l_o_w_.
    Other than checking for low level compliance with basic x86 stuff it's completely useless on a productive application usage level.
    Then again, I have to say that Win95 actually *did* run. Err, make that crawl.

  • Boch CAN run Windows XP as a guest OS (Score:5, Informative)

    by rcb1974 ( 654474 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @08:10AM (#8157315) Homepage
    I got bochs v2.1 to run Windows XP without any problems. The trick is to configure bochs with --enable-cpu-level=5 --disable-sse.

    Here are some screenshots and a howto [tripod.com]

  • Don't forget Dosbox (Score:3, Informative)

    by SuiteSisterMary ( 123932 ) <slebrunNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday February 02, 2004 @12:50PM (#8159574) Journal

    DosBox [sourceforge.net] is, of course, the other option.

  • Is this a potential replacement for citrix, at least part of it? Or is it too slow?

    Meaning I could throw a window from a unix server running MS access to any unix box or windows box(with the added software).

    Or am I missing something.

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