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)
The wxWindows interface has grown so that you can edit all bochsrc parameters using menus and dialog boxes (Bryce Denney)
Added support for the AMD x86-64 instruction set used in their Hammer processor (Peter Tattam)
Added support for MMX instructions (Stanislav Shwartzman)
Added support for SSE and SSE2 instructions (Stanislav Shwartzman)
Remote GDB stub support (Johan Rydberg, Stu Grossman)
Added plugin support for Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, and Cygwin. Plugins allow you to compile Bochs with support for many options and load the pieces that you want at runtime.

The Release Process
Before the 2.0 release is finalized, a few things need to happen. First, the developers declare a feature freeze, during which only bug fixes will be added to the CVS. The feature freeze began around the first of November, and will continue until the release is ready. During the feature freeze, we focus on testing Bochs in all sorts of configurations, fixing bugs, updating documentation, and generally cleaning things up. The freeze 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.

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.

As the release approaches, we make some pre-release versions with binaries so that it's easy for people to try out the new features and check if we've broken anything. These will be called 2.0.pre1, 2.0.pre2, etc. Meanwhile, we continue fixing things, cleaning up, and trying very hard not to add more bugs in the process. Eventually the developers will agree that we've done enough testing and we should go ahead and call it 2.0.

Click to see Bug Reports.
Click to see Feature Requests.
Click to see Patches.

Try out a Pre-Release

Date	Version	Description	Download
2002-11-19	Bochs 2.0.pre2	Bochs source code	1.9meg
		Source RPM for Linux (all architectures)	1.9meg
		Binary RPM for x86 Linux. This RPM was built on a Redhat 8.0 system. It was compiled with plugins, CDROM, SB emulation, NE2000, VBE, all speed optimizations, PCI, MMX, SSE, and SSE2. The default display library is X11, but you can also select between SDL, term, RFB, wxWindows, or no gui using the display_library option in bochsrc.	2.1meg
		Binary RPM for x86 Linux, compiled for Redhat 7.3.	2.1meg
		ZIP file with Win32 binaries. The binaries were compiled with MS VC++ 6.0, with CDROM, SB emulation, NE2000, VBE, and all speed optimizations.	2.3meg
		ZIP file with Bochs source code configured for MS VC++ 6.0 (win32). You can unzip this file, load up the MS VC++ workspace "bochs.dsw" and just click on Build.	2.3meg
2002-11-14	Bochs 2.0.pre1	Bochs source code	1.9meg
		Source RPM for Linux (all architectures)	1.8meg
		Binary RPM for x86 Linux. This RPM was built on a Redhat 6.2 system. It was compiled with support for X windows, CDROM, SB emulation, NE2000, VBE, and all speed optimizations.	1.8meg
2002-09-07	wxWindows 2.3.3	The main wxWindows site is at http://wxwindows.org/. Bochs works best with version 2.3.3. A few binary packages that have been tested with Bochs are listed below. If you find a binary that matches your system, try it. Otherwise, look on the wxWindows web site and see what you can find.
		Source RPM for Linux (all architectures)	4.8meg
		Binary RPM for x86 Linux, containing wxWindows dynamic libraries. This RPM was compiled on an x86 machine running Redhat Linux 8.0.	2.3meg
		Binary RPM for x86 Linux, containing wxWindows static libraries. This RPM was compiled on an x86 machine running Redhat Linux 8.0.	2.2meg
		Binary RPM for x86 Linux, containing header files that you need to compile any wxWindows application. This RPM was compiled on an x86 machine running Redhat Linux 8.0. 551k.	551k
		ZIP file with Cygwin libraries, release version. These were compiled without debug support.	3.6meg
		ZIP file with Cygwin libraries, debug version. These were compiled with debug support so they are useful if you are doing any kind of wxWindows development.	8.8meg
2002-10-06	SDL 1.4.5	The SDL library can be downloaded from http://libsdl.org. Bochs has been tested most with 1.2.4, but get the most recent version you can find.

Last Modified on by Bryce