The Bochs x86 PC Emulator [LWN.net]

The Bochs x86 PC Emulator

Posted Jan 22, 2004 18:45 UTC (Thu) by eludias (subscriber, #4058)
In reply to: The Bochs x86 PC Emulator by danshearer
Parent article: The Bochs x86 PC Emulator

For a better performing CPU emulator (but currently also less complete), see also QEMU: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ . Reported speeds are ~10% of real computer (with cheats).

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The Bochs x86 PC Emulator

Posted Jan 24, 2004 9:10 UTC (Sat) by danshearer (guest, #18686) [Link]

Agreed!

QEMU also has a modular, pluggable design that improves a lot on Bochs. It can emulate architectures other than x86.

Unfortunately it doesn't abstract out architecture descriptions well (no open source emulators do.) See some PowerPC implementation at
http://savannah.nongnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/qemu/qemu/target-ppc/op.c?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
as an example. What is required is a grammar so that there can be one canonical description for an architecture used by all sorts of emulators.

Many such grammars exist but there are no free implementations I know of. There is also no interest to use them among the people who develop emulators :-(

--
Dan Shearer
dan@shearer.org

The Bochs x86 PC Emulator

Posted Jan 24, 2004 10:01 UTC (Sat) by danshearer (guest, #18686) [Link]

This was actually a bit strong:

> There is also no interest...

Because I haven't tried all that hard to elicit any.

Dan