bochs vs. vmware

Aleksandar Milivojevic amilivojevic at pbl.ca
Wed Apr 20 14:03:35 UTC 2005


kwhiskers wrote:
> Now bochs is up to 2.2 (almost). Would this make a good replacement
> for vmware for the home user who uses it maybe once every few weeks,
> only to run corel photopaint 9? I would like to install windows xp on
> it.

I'd try with qemu and kqemu accelerator module:

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

It can emulate Intel PC, Sparc, PowerPC and possibly others.  PC 
emulation is stable, Sparc and PowerPC are still somewhat experimental.

By default, it will emulate Intel CPU using software.  There is also 
accelerator module kqemu (it is a kernel module) that enables Intel 
instructions to be run natively on Intel (no emulation).  However, to 
use it, you need to fetch version of qemu from CVS, and recompile 
(instructions included with accelerator module).  You'd also want CVS 
version if you want to run Windows XP (some bug fixed that prevented Win 
XP from booting).

I'm using CVS version of qemu with accelerator module from time to time, 
and it works very nice.  I used it to run Red Hat 7.3, Fedora Core 3, 
CentOS 4, Windows XP, and Solaris 10 (for x86).  The only grief I had 
was that qemu emulates only PCI version of ne2000 Ethernet card, and 
that particular card (although very common) is not supported under 
Solaris x86.

The qemu emulates an entire virtual machine.  Disks and CD-ROMs can be 
either images, or real devices (or partitions on them).  Note that if 
you give it a real disk, guest OS will have access to MBR and can/will 
overwrite it if you run qemu as root (since guest OS does not know it is 
running under emulator).  The emulated virtual PC has an ne2000 Ethernet 
card, and Cyrus CL-GD5446 VGA card.

-- 
Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca>    Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator                           1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276                     Winnipeg, MB  R3T 1L7




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