What is Bochs?
Bochs is an open source emulator for the x86 architecture, allowing you to run operating systems like Windows, Linux, BSD and others on your computer without needing virtualization support from the CPU. It emulates common x86 hardware, including the CPU, memory, disks, network cards, graphics and more.
Some key features of Bochs include:
- Emulation of IA-32 (x86) Intel processors up to Pentium 4, AMD Athlon 64 and AMD Phenom
- Support for running 32-bit and 64-bit x86 operating systems
- Emulated hard drives, optical drives, floppy drives, network adapters and sound cards
- Integrated debugging tools for tracing instruction execution and examining CPU registers/memory
- Graphical interface allowing you to inspect running operating systems
- Portable codebase that runs on Linux, Windows, OS X and other platforms
Bochs is useful for testing new operating system designs, running software not compatible with your native hardware, prototyping device drivers or running malware samples safely. It can run software written decades ago as well modern operating systems, all without virtualization. The downside is performance - being an emulator, it is much slower than native hardware speeds.
VirtualBox, QEMU, VMware Workstation Pro, Parallels Desktop, VMware vSphere Hypervisor, Windows Sandbox, Portable Virtualbox, VMware Workstation Player, KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), VMware Fusion, VMWare Disk Mount, Mojopac, JPCSIM, VMLite Workstation, VMLite VBoot, box86, VMLite MyOldPCs, PearPC, MokaFive Player, VMX Builder, USBFastBoot are some alternatives to Bochs.