Bochs

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:Bochs for Windows displaying HAL91 (Linux).pngBochs is a portable open source x86 and AMD64 PCs emulator mostly written in [[C++]]. It supports emulation of the processor(s) (including protected mode), memory, disks, display, ethernet, BIOS and common hardware peripherals of PCs.

Many guest operating systems can be run using the emulator including DOS, several versions of Windows, BSDs, and Linux. Bochs can run on many host operating systems, including Windows, Linux, OS X and the Xbox.

Bochs is mostly used for operating system development (when an emulated operating system crashes, it does not crash the host operating system, so the emulated OS can be debugged) and to run other guest operating systems inside already running host operating systems. Some people use it to run old computer games inside their non-compatible computers.

Image:Bochs-win95.PNG

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Use

Bochs can emulate the hardware needed by the guest operating system, including hard drives, cd drives, and floppy drives. Disk and ISO images can be "inserted" while the system is being run. However, the system performance is very slow due to the fact that it is only emulated. It doesn't provide any CPU virtualization features.

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