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- update FAQs on license, author, maintainers, performaance,

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screen shots, cdrom, sound, network card
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Bryce Denney 2001-05-09 00:33:03 +00:00
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bochs/docs-html/faq.html
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@ -22,20 +22,12 @@
<BR>
<a name="license"></a>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: Is bochs Open Source?.</FONT></B>
<BR><b>Yes!</b> &nbsp;Thanks <u>very</u> much to
<a href="http://www.linux-mandrake.com">MandrakeSoft</a>, producers of
the much acclaimed Linux-Mandrake distribution. &nbsp;They
have enabled bochs to be made Open Source, and I have become
part of their team, working on plex86/bochs. Bochs is now released
under the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html">GNU LGPL</a>.
<BR>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: Who is the author of bochs?</FONT></B>
<BR>Well, I'm (Kevin Lawton) the primary author
of bochs. There have been bug fixes, enhancements, and
code contributions from some few hundred people to date.
Support has been incredible! And it's growing. Without
it, I would have quit years ago.
<B>Yes!</B>
Bochs is released under the LGPL, much thanks to <a
href="http://www.linux-mandrake.com">MandrakeSoft</a>, makers of the
Linux-Mandrake distribution.
<BR>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: How do you pronounce "bochs"?</FONT></B>
@ -44,39 +36,30 @@
machines a "Linux box", "Windows box", ... Bochs emulates
a box inside a box.
<BR>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: Who is the author of bochs?</FONT></B>
<BR>Kevin Lawton is the primary author of bochs. There have
been bug fixes, enhancements, and code contributions from some few
hundred people, so it is not possible to list them all. Kevin
is presently working on a PC virtualization project called
<a href="http://www.plex86.org">plex86</a> and no longer maintain bochs.
<BR>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: Who maintains bochs now?</FONT></B>
<BR>With Kevin's help, in April 2001, the members of the
bochs-developers mailing list set up a new official bochs site hosted
by <a href="http://sourceforge.net">Source Forge</a>. The current
admins on this project are Bryce Denney and Greg Alexander.
<BR>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: Tell me about peformance when running bochs?</FONT></B>
<BR><I>Up to now</I>, bochs has exclusively used interpreter
emulation technology; fetch in an instruction, decode,
then execute it. I am currently in the process of adding
dynamic translation, which allows for small x86 code sequences
to be translated into native CPU code sequences, on-the-fly.
This native code is cached, so it can be run any number of
times thereafter. There's an architecture neutral part
to the dynamic translation, and an architecture specific
part (back-end). There needs to be a back-end for each
platform bochs runs on. It's too early for me to comment
on performance using dynamic translation. But, I have tested
a few code sample, and I walked away with a smile on my face.
I'm hoping to release the framework for this in the next
release or two. It won't have many instructions translated,
but those will be added incrementally, and quickly, once the
framework is stable. The first backends will support
Linux/x86 and BeOS/x86. Probably SPARC after that. It
would be helpful if I could get a high-end PPC platform
loaner. Multiple CPU's would be wonderful, but not essential.
I'll need one for writing a back-end for it.
Also, I want to add threading to bochs. At some point, I want to
put certain parts (optionally) in their own thread. Also,
I believe with very careful lightweight thread communication,
it may be possible to thread the CPU emulation itself.
This idea was suggested on the developer's email list.
<P> So, back to your question. If you need speed, wait for
dynamic translation. In interpreted mode, I get approximately
1.5MIPS using bochs on my 400Mhz PII Linux machine. In dynamic
translation mode, you will see a lag as bochs encounters
new code, then it'll get snappy and run at a much higher
rate than in interpreted mode.
<BR>Because Bochs emulates every x86 instruction and all the devices in a PC
system, it does not reach high emulation speeds. Kevin reported
approximately 1.5MIPS using bochs on a 400Mhz PII Linux machine.
Users who have an x86 processor and want the highest emulation speeds
may want to consider PC virtualization sotware uch as plex86 (free) or
vmware (commercial).
<BR>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: Does bochs use a disk partition to install the OS?</FONT></B>
@ -103,27 +86,23 @@
<BR>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: Do you know of any snapshots of Bochs running Win95?</FONT></B>
<BR>There are some on external project sites. Look at the
main bochs web page under "What is Bochs" or other topic.
I don't include any, because I'm trying to keep the web site
very low bandwidth.
<BR>Yes! Look for "screen shots" on the <a href="http://bochs.sourceforge.net">Bochs home page</a> or on other Bochs sites.
<BR>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: Does bochs support a CDROM?</FONT></B>
<BR>Not yet. However you can use the "mtools" package on quite
a few platforms, to copy files from your CDROM to a disk image
file. Make sure to comply with all software copyright issues.
<BR>Yes, a CDROM is supported in Linux, Windows, and OpenBSD. The
CDROM drivers for bochs allow the guest operating system to access the
host operating system's CDROM data directly.
<BR>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: Does bochs support a sound device?</FONT></B>
<BR>Not yet. There are efforts in this area going on by
contributing authors. The emulation is of a Sound Blaster.
<BR>Yes, there is Sound Blaster emulation support for Windows and Linux.
<BR>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: Does bochs support a network card?</FONT></B>
<BR>Not yet. There are also efforts in this area going on by
contributing authors. The emulation is of an NE2000 NIC,
and I'm told it's quite far along.
<BR>Supposedly yes. There is emulation for an NE2000 NIC in the current
releases, though I have not heard whether it works or not. If you try it,
please fill out a testing form or bug report.
<BR>
<BR><B><FONT COLOR="#000066">Q: What applications are known to run inside of bochs?</FONT></B>