KevinLawton BryceDenney MichaelCalabrese

Bochs is a portable x86 PC emulation software package that emulates enough of the x86 CPU, related AT hardware, and BIOS to run DOS, Windows '95, Minix 2.0, and other OS's, all on your workstation. Bochs is an open source project distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. It was originally a commercial product, but in March 2000 MandrakeSoft bought Bochs and committed it to Open Source. Here is the press release. Bochs now compiles/runs on many platforms. See the following list for supported platforms and special notes: Unix/X11 This is my main development platform. BeOS I also did this port, originally to R3/PPC using CodeWarrior. It now works on R4/x86 with egcs. Simon Huet picked up maintaining/reworking the BeOS GUI port. Check out Simon's BeBochs page. Win32 This port was done by David Ross. I've enhanced the build process for Win32. You can compile with either the MS Visual C++ 5.0 or GNU-Win32 environments. Go to Compiling Bochs on Win32 OS/2 Nick Behnken used PE2LX to translate David Ross's Win32 port to an OS/2 program. Check out Nick Behnken's page. OS/2 Craig Ballantyne ported bochs to OS/2. I will integrate this back into the main bochs source soon. Check out the guiSoft Corp. home page. Macintosh David Batterham drbatter@socs.uts.edu.au or drbatter@yahoo.com ported bochs to the Mac. His changes are integrated, though it is work in progress. He compiled with CodeWarrior Pro R1 (CW12), and included a project file 'Bochs.proj' in the top-level directory of source code, which you may need to modify. I added a '--with-macos' option to configure, so you can use a Unix machine to generate header files for the Mac. Check out David's MacBochs website. David has not had time to maintain the page or the Mac port since early 2000. If you have Mac development tools and want to contribute, contact the developers list. FreeDOS for Bochs David Batterham also offers information on running FreeDOS inside of bochs. You can download a disk image with a pre-installed copy of FreeDOS, a completely free DOS-like operating system. Check out his website at http://members.xoom.com/macbochs/freedos.html. For more info about FreeDOS, see FreeDOS Web page There's more! You can find more detailed testing information on the testing status page on bochs.sourceforge.net.

Bochs is released under the GNU LGPL, much thanks to MandrakeSoft, makers of the Linux-Mandrake distribution.

run more than one operating system without rebooting OS developers use Bochs to system software without endangering their development machine or rebooting. students use Bochs to learn about how PC hardware works hardware designers use bochs to help test new hardware Is Bochs Open Source? Yes! Bochs is released under the GNU LGPL, much thanks to MandrakeSoft, makers of the Linux-Mandrake distribution. How do you pronounce "bochs"? Phonetically the same as the English word "box". It's just a play on the word "box", since techies like to call their machines a "Linux box", "Windows box", ... Bochs emulates a box inside a box. Who is the author of bochs? 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 plex86 and no longer maintain bochs. Who maintains bochs now? With Kevin's help, in April 2001, the members of the bochs-developers mailing list set up a new official bochs site hosted by Source Forge. The current admins on this project are Bryce Denney and Greg Alexander. Tell me about peformance when running bochs? 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). Does bochs use a disk partition to install the OS? No. You use a disk image file, which is simply a large file, like any other file, on your platform's disk. Why can't I use Bochs with my current Win95 installation? Think about this. If you had two different PC's, they would require different hardware drivers. So you may not be able to safely move a disk drive with Win95 on it, from one to the other. Bochs is no different. It emulates a certain set of hardware devices, and requires each OS be configured for those devices. Is there a developer's email list for bochs? Yes. For instructions on joining, go to Developers email-list. Is there an irc channel for bochs? Not that I am aware of. Do you know of any snapshots of Bochs running Win95? Yes! Look for "screen shots" on the Bochs home page or on other Bochs sites. Does bochs support a CDROM? 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. Does bochs support a sound device? Yes, there is Sound Blaster emulation support for Windows and Linux. Does bochs support a network card? 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. What applications are known to run inside of bochs? Well, lot's of different OS's run inside of bochs, so thousands. I'm assuming your asking about Windows programs. To give you a few, the following ones from the Winstone'98 tests worked: Access 97 CorelDRAW! 7 Excel 97 Lotus 1-2-3 97 Word 97 PowerPoint 97 Quattro Pro 7 WordPerfect 7 Also, I've compiled an entire OS kernel inside bochs before. Not to mention, running DOOM, though at then-pathetic speeds.

You can get the soruce code for Bochs from the Bochs' home page at bochs.SourceForge.net. From here you can get hold of the latest stable source along with binaries for unix and windows. You can also use CVS software to obtain the a snapshot of the development version. pointer to SF web site

unzip into some directory. Look for DOC-win32.html for more instructions. Quick start: find dlxlinux/start.bat and double click

rpm -i bochs-<VERSION>;.rpm Look for /usr/local/bochs/latest/DOC-linux.html, man pages for bochs. Quick start: run bochs-dlx (in /usr/local/bin)

All releases are gzip'd tar files. That means the whole Bochs source code directory has been consolidated into one file using the Unix command 'tar', then compressed to save space with GNU 'gzip'. To extract the source code, you'll need both 'tar' and 'gzip/gunzip'. All files are contained within one subdirectory named 'bochs-YYMMDDv'. cd /path/parent-directory gzip -dc bochs-YYMMDDv.tar.gz | tar -xvf - cd bochs-YYMMDDv Run configure to make the Makefiles List of configure arguments Option of using .conf.* scripts What to report if configure fails: Tar up config.* and send to bochs-testing@tlw.com Make What to try if make fails: turn off configure options, look at SF bugs and patches section to see if it's a known problem, try to fix it yourself, if using CVS version try a release source file instead, fix it yourself Make install, what it installs and where /usr/local/bochs/$VERSION/* /usr/local/bin/bochs (and bximage) /usr/man/man1/bochs*.1 (and bximage.1) make install_dlx option How to build an RPM in Linux

Getting the makefiles Download them from web site in a zip, install them on top of the source directory Run configure on a unix box, copy the Makefiles and config.h to your windows machine RUN CONFIGURE IN BOCHS! This would be awesome. Cygwin? Building it with NMAKE Installation? Maybe download an existing windows binary package and drop in your new binary. There is no make install, though this may be added some day.

I have no idea.

bochsrc, BIOS, VGABIOS, VGA font, disk images. table of bochsrc options and what they do BIOS/VGABIOS, what do they do? VGA font, how to install it disk images where to find one pre-made make a blank one with bximage grab one from a real hard disk

Resources for users bochs-developers mailing list, archive testing status page: tells what has been tried and who got it working SourceForge look for bug reports how to report problems, make feature requests What's a panic? How to report it to bug tracker, how to make it non-fatal. Mouse behavior, enabling and disabling Keyboard mapping problems [...] Mount disk image in loopback Using two hard disks [...]

What disk images are available. Installing from scratch. What works Known problems