bochs: The Open Source IA-32 Emulation Project (About Bochs 2.0)

Bochs 2.0 is Coming!
This page describes the latest progress as we move toward releasing Bochs 2.0. Please check it periodically, because it will change regularly.

What's new?
Our last release was Bochs 1.4.1 on June 23 of this year. Since then there has been a LOT of development activity, especially since mid-August. Here's a summary.

CPU optimizations boost simulation speed by around 2x. (Kevin Lawton)
Bochs now supports up to 8 hard drives, or 8 CDROMs, or any combination (Christophe Bothamy)
wxWindows interface has grown so that you can edit all bochsrc parameters using menus and dialog boxes (Bryce Denney)
Bochs can now emulate the AMD x86-64 instruction set used in their Hammer processor (Peter Tattam)
Bochs can now emulate MMX instructions (Stanislav Shwartzman).
Remote GDB stub support (Johan Rydberg, Stu Grossman)
IN PROGRESS: Stanislav is currently working on SSE/SSE2 support.
IN PROGRESS: Christophe and Bryce are working on plugin support, so that you can compile in support for many more options and enable them at runtime. For example, you could compile in support for 4 different gui libraries (X11, SDL, RFB, wxWindows) and select between them in your bochsrc.

The Release Process
Before the 2.0 release is finalized, a few things need to happen. First, the developers will declare a feature freeze, during which only bug fixes will be added to the CVS. This has not begun quite yet because there are a few important features (e.g. plugins, SSE) that aren't quite ready to be merged into the main trunk.

When the feature freeze begins, we can focus on testing Bochs in all sorts of configurations, fixing bugs, updating documentation, and cleaning things up. This will last until we have some confidence that the most critical bugs have been fixed or worked around, and that Bochs will compile and work on all supported platforms. The documentation should cover all the new features and options. Bryce hopes that the feature freeze will last about 2 weeks, but really it will last until the developers think the code has been adequately debugged and tested.

During this time, the Source Forge bug/feature/patch trackers are very important and very useful. Any bug that we intend to fix before the 2.0 release should be marked with Group="to be fixed in v2.0". At the time of release, there will be no more open bugs, features, or patches marked for v2.0. All items that are marked for v2.0 will be either fixed (and closed), or postponed by changing their Group marking to something else like "long range goal". Using the bug database helps to ensure that nothing important gets forgotten. When you're looking at the Source Forge database, you can click on the Group box and select just the items that are selected for v2.0.

Click to see Bug Reports.
Click to see Feature Requests.
Click to see Patches.
Last Modified on by Bryce