Bochs

Now, let's explore some of the internals of Bochs to understand how it achieves useful performance in a pure C implementation.

With your CD-ROM image and hard disk image in hand, the next step is to create your Bochs configuration file.

Bochs is a great platform emulator for executing older operating systems, but it's also an ideal platform for developing operating systems.

Bochs accomplishes this through emulation, but it comes at the cost of performance.

Bochs provides a large number of options expressible through the configuration file.

This mode is similar to Bochs in that it emulates a full personal computer (PC) system with processor and peripherals.

Bochs can support a number of image types, but for performance, request flat, because no run time dynamic growth will be necessary.

Bochs's internal instruction cache provides a nice trade-off to traditional JIT compilation.

Bochs is similar to QEMU in that it provides full system emulation.

Bochs provides an emulation of the PC platform, with the device emulation based on the device type.

Bochs is an x86 PC emulator and debugger licensed under the lesser GNU Public License (GPL).

Bochs was developed purely in the C language for interpreted x86 instruction execution and platform emulation.

Bochs is an x86 computer simulator that is portable and runs on a variety of platforms, including x86, PowerPC, Alpha, SPARC, and MIPS.

Bochs provides a special utility to create this file called bximage.

Figure 6 shows the FreeDOS kernel booting on Bochs.