bochs: The Open Source IA-32 Emulation Project (Home Page)

Welcome to the Bochs IA-32 Emulator Project
Bochs is a highly portable open source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++, that runs on most popular platforms. It includes emulation of the Intel x86 CPU, common I/O devices, and a custom BIOS. Currently, bochs can be compiled to emulate a 386, 486 or Pentium CPU. Bochs is capable of running most Operating Systems inside the emulation including Linux, Windows® 95, DOS, and recently Windows® NT 4. Bochs was written by Kevin Lawton and is currently maintained by this project.
Bochs can be compiled and used in a variety of modes, some which are still in development. The 'typical' use of bochs is to provide complete x86 PC emulation, including the x86 processor, hardware devices, and memory. This allows you to run OS's and software within the emulator on your workstation, much like you have a machine inside of a machine. For instance, let's say your workstation is a Unix/X11 workstation, but you want to run Win'95 applications. Bochs will allow you to run Win 95 and associated software on your Unix/X11 workstation, displaying a window on your workstation, simulating a monitor on a PC.

Current Release
Bochs 1.2.1 (June 12, 2001): Bochs 1.2.1 is a bugfix release based on version 1.2. Bochs 1.2 includes usability improvements such as improved control over error handling, an interactive disk image creator, and features including dual hard drive support, multiple processor emulation (SMP), and VNC remote viewer mode. ( Press Release - Details - ">Download Now ) For the newest features, use the anonymous CVS server version. (Details - More Info)

This Tuesday, Join us for a Bochs IRC Chat
The Bochs community will hold an IRC open discussion chat on Tuesday, June 19th, 2001. The discussion will take place between 6:00PM and 8:00PM, US Pacific time (GMT-0700). Last time it continued for more than two hours beyond the expected ending time! Will we cover a large array of topics that relate to the current happenings in Bochs (Find out More). There's a transcript of our last talk on May 30, 2001 here.

Progress on Bochs Networking!
Peter Grehan is the author of the NE2000 (network adapter) and serial code in Bochs. He is helping us out once again to improve networking support in Bochs. Bryce Denney and Peter met to talk about how to get Bochs talking on the network in different host operating systems. ( Learn more )

Help Wanted
We currently need help with the following tasks:

PC Hardware Gurus: Mouse, interrupt controller, timer, IDE controller, network card, keyboard, VGA... Most of our bug reports and feature requests are due to incomplete C++ models of the various PC devices. To improve this, we need PC Hardware Gurus who know where to find the specs for this stuff and improve the hardware models for Bochs. Working on models is a fun way to learn how things work, and unlike designing a real hard disk, you can test out your changes on a real operating system immediately!
Documentation: Adding installation help and other useful information into the docs.
Testing: Help us fill in the blanks on our Bochs Status page by testing different combinations of host and guest OSes.

To help with one of these tasks, please contact Bryce Denney.

Latest News

June 16, 2001: ">Bochs 1.2.1 is now available.
June 3, 2001: ">Bochs 1.2 is now available in both source and binary form. Read all about this major new release over here.
May 23, 2001: Activity Update - Less than a month after the transfer to Sourceforge, Bochs has reached the top of the SourceForge project activity chart! Thanks to Todd T. Fries for the update.
May 22, 2001: Bochs is number two on the SourceForge project activity chart today!
May 17, 2001: ">Bochs 1.1.2 is released, fixing several bugs found in the previous Bugfix2 release.
May 12, 2001: After hovering around 10th place on the SourceForge activity rankings for the better part of a week, Bochs moves up even further! Bochs is listed as the 6th most active project on SF today.
May 11, 2001: Our new site is released, with more information, a new screen shots section, CVS nightly tarballs, and much more!
May 3, 2001: We are trying to gather a screenshot gallery of Bochs in action. If you have a screenshot you would like to share, please e-mail it to Tim Butler.

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