Bochs

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Bochs

Bochs.png
Basic data

developer Kevin Lawton
Volker Ruppert
Stanislav Shwartsman
Publishing year 1994
Current  version 2.6.11
( January 5, 2020 )
operating system AmigaOS , BeOS , BSD ( FreeBSD , NetBSD , OpenBSD ), iOS , Linux , macOS , MorphOS , OS / 2 , Windows
programming language C ++
category Emulation , virtualization
License LGPL ( Free Software )
German speaking No
bochs.sf.net

Bochs [ bɔks ] is a free x86 - and AMD64 - emulator and debugger that the terms of the LGPL subject.

Many operating systems , such as Windows or Linux , can be operated under Bochs. Bochs is also available for many different operating systems.

Bochs also serves as a platform for developing and testing an operating system or hardware-related applications for a PC , for example . The aim of the developers is to achieve full PC compatibility. However, since Bochs, as a pure emulator, does not directly execute the machine commands, the execution speeds are correspondingly lower than with virtual machines such as VirtualBox , VMware Workstation or Virtual PC .

Bochs is able to emulate an x86 processor on a non-x86 architecture . For example, under Mac OS X on the Apple Macintosh with a PowerPC processor or under Solaris on the SPARC architecture, an x86 guest system such as Windows can be used.

In the meantime, variants have also emerged, such as porting Bochs to the PlayStation Portable , the iPhone or the GP2X .

Virtual hardware

Bochs emulates the complete hardware of an IBM-compatible PC . This makes the execution speed very slow in relation to the speed of the host system, but this means that the virtual hardware is the same on each host system. This consists of a minimum of:

  1. Processor ( English Central Processing Unit , CPU)
  2. Programmable Interval Timer (PIT)
  3. Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC)
  4. DMA - Controller for direct memory access
  5. RAM ( RAM and BIOS - ROM )
  6. a graphics card (most often a VGA card is emulated)
  7. Intel 8042 controller for keyboard and mouse
  8. Real Time Clock ( english Real Time Clock RTC) with battery-buffered NVRAM
  9. various motherboard - circuits ( English integrated circuits , ICs) that virtually connect said components

So that the virtual PC can be used like a real PC, Bochs also emulates connections for virtual hard drives, audio via a virtual sound card and a network card. This is u. a. the following virtual hardware:

See also

Web links

Commons : Bochs  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ bochs.sourceforge.net .
  2. ↑ Stanislav Shwartsman, Darek Mihoka: How Bochs Works Under the Hood, 2nd edition. (PDF; 833k) June 2012, accessed on November 2, 2016 (English).