bochs

[elias]

ive heard people on this board saying that their code works on bochs, but not a real PC, or vice versa. whats teh point of using bochs? to get an OS that runs under it?

[jrfritz]

So you don't need to reboot!

Lets you program your OS about 50% faster!

[Guest]

i find it much easier to develop usin bochs because it save me the time of rebooting.
i think it is a much faster way of testing you OS.

[chrisa128]

Get another PC or two.

Lots easier than learning to use BOCH's

[jrfritz]

Bochs is easy! What are you talking about?

Download->Install->Type in a few options->Save as config file->....then from now on all you need to do is run BOCHs and it loads your os....

[DarylD]

Bochs is fantastic for fast development, I can boot my kernel off a floppy disk in about 5 seconds. To reboot my machine or even use another one would take much longer than this.

In fact Bochs is faster than VMWare for booting off a floppy disk. I have stopped using VMWare because of this.

I probably do a compile/test cycle every few minutes.

[Pype.Clicker]

but bochs is slow ... it takes it about 5 min. to initialize Clicker... once you're OS will be grown up, you'll find the need for a second PC anyway ... But if you're still fighting with pmode and bootsectors, yes, BOCHS will be your friend because he'll gracefully say "3rd exception unresolved" instead of simply rebooting the test machine without a clue ...

[DarylD]

Hey! My code is reasonably far along...not as much as yours maybe but still.

Maybe you are writing "inefficient code" doing lots of loops!!

Only kidding!

Although VMWare is undoubtedly faster once it gets to a certain complexity.

I like bochs because it boots floppies about 10 times faster than my real pc.

[Pype.Clicker]

well, i have to admit my debugging policy consumes alot of cycles for BOCHS ...

[chrisa128]

When I started OS programming I didn't know about BOCHS.

When it was working on my PC's I made a boot floppy and went round local schools and librarys to test it on as many machines as I could.

After this I knew my code would work and did the next part....

[df]

i wouldnt give up vmware for bochs anyday. unless i was doing aa64 dev work or ia64 dev work...

i'll stick to vmware.

[jrfritz]

I just got VMWare for windows...so now i'm going to switch to windows and program my OS in windows most likely...
Bochs is better for debugging...vmware is better for faster emulation and emulator stability...

[K.J.]

vmware is better for faster emulation and emulator stability...

I agree that Bochs is better for debugging. And yes, VMWare is faster, but I've used both Bochs and VMWare and have found VMWare on Windows to be the more unstable of the two, though I've found just the opposite on Linux.

K.J.

[elias]

but how come some people say that their code dosnt work on bochs, but on a PC? i remember my code caused BOCHs to give some eror i dont remember, while the PC gave me a blicking cursor.

[DarylD]

Elias: Possibly because bochs is not supporting some feature of the hardware found on a real PC. An example I think Tim mentioned was with the mouse code and the cursor wheel. As everything has to be emulated on bochs, there will undoubtedly be parts where the implementation isn't complete or doesn't follow bugs in real hardware.

Daryl.