Best free virtualizer

[dude101]

What do you guys think is best, QEMU, VirtualPC, or VirtualBox?

[Troy Martin]

VirtualBox. Don't ask why, it's just free, fast, and easy to configure. And I like it.

[ruisleipa]

I use both QEMU and Bochs. QEMU is faster, but for debugging I prefer Bochs because of its built-in debugger.

[Brynet-Inc]

VirtualBox doesn't emulate the x86 properly.. and they're not interested in fixing it.

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=120492689515501&w=2

[extremecoder]

Virtual box always throws error, when I want to mount USB's ...
I always use VMWare server 1.0.8, which is free ...
Infact i am running Server OS in that only (FreeBSD) ...

[gedd]

VirtualBox is excellent and is developpement is continuous and very active , last version 2.2.2 few day ago

I suggest it for developpement and all other to test.
- qemu
- virtual PC
- vmware player (you have to modify configuration file)
and finaly a real PC

NOTE : Bochs 2.4 is comming soon with some interesting feature from the changelog :

- Added graphical Bochs debugger frontend for most of the supported platforms.

[Brendan]

Hi,

What do you guys think is best, QEMU, VirtualPC, or VirtualBox?

IMHO the idea is to have as many real computers as possible and as many emulators as possible, to increase the chance of finding compatibility problems in your OS. Basically, use all of these emulators (and Bochs, and anything else you can get your hands on).

For OS debugging, I use Bochs - it's extremely flexible (e.g. able to emulate a very wide variety of CPUs), and the internal debugger is extremely useful (and recently some nice people added a graphical front-end to it, making it even better!)...


Cheers,

Brendan

[Troy Martin]

Now, in all OSDev-sided honesty: I test in Virtual PC. I don't know why, it just works for me.

[Combuster]

Bochs for debugging, VirtualPC for more real-like tests. A real computer for the real deal.

IMO qemu and other VMs have little more to add than "just another test case"

[Kevin]

Heretic! qemu is the one and only! Okay, I am biased...

Seriously, qemu is faster than bochs, supports lots of hardware, quite a few architectures and so on, plus it's not bad for debugging either (I don't know bochs too well, so I won't compare to bochs's debugging). This makes it a really good test platform. bochs is great for the first steps in Protected Mode because it has nice error messages, but once you're settled I think qemu (possibly with KVM) is what you want to use for development.

For testing, you'll obviously take everything you can get.

[Zenith]

Well, Bochs DOES have a fully integrated and functional GUI debugger that allows you to query the state of any portion of the CPU or memory, step through assembly instructions, set breakpoints, log exceptions and interrupts and more. And also, many possible configurations like SMP, NICs and even a simulated Cirrus video card are available. (However, QEMU actually supports more than the x86 and x86-64 architecture, so it's your call.)

But of course, all of these features are completely irrelevant.

[01000101]

I use bochs for normal library function testing and lower-level debugging (due to its debugging features).
I use QEMU and VirtualBox-OSE for their network card support.

They're all good, and I can't pick "a best" as they all would have a major flaw (to me) by themselves. I'd much prefer a ton of real hardware though.

[pcmattman]

Hi,

I use QEMU as it's fast, and it's the only emulator which supports 3C90X cards.

That, and it's extremely easy to configure/script - command line - and its usermode network stack is extremely useful for quick testing.

[quanganht]

I used to like VMWare cause it's the most accurate virtualizer. But since Bochs got 2.4, it is the best, althought the configuration is a little PITA. It should auto load the config used from the last time, so I can open it, and hit "Start"

[salil_bhagurkar]

I guess Bochs is the best. I use QEMU since I compile and run 100 times a minute . Bochs is better if its an earlier version. Newer ones are slow at boot time.