Linux Journal: Emulate This!, Part 3

[ Thanks to 2more0 for this link.
]

“Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the
SysAdmin’s Corner. In this article, I’m going to take you a little
deeper into the world of emulation, from software emulation to
hardware emulation. This is a story about thinking inside the box
or, rather, inside the Bochs.

“Bochs is an emulator for the x86 hardware platform. In other
words, it can emulate a PC of varying hardware configurations. When
you boot into Bochs, it will appear as though you are booting
another PC from inside your own PC, and in a way, you are. Bochs
emulates the entire PC platform, I/O devices, memory and its own
BIOS. What’s even more interesting is that you don’t have to be
running PC hardware to run Bochs. It will emulate x86 hardware on
any platform on which you compile it. By changing the
configuration, it is possible to specify the type of processor
(386? 486? 586?), the amount of memory and so on. Bochs is a box
inside your box. In fact, Bochs is as many boxes as you want it to
be. It even has its own power button.

“All right, that’s cool. But what can you do with this thing?
Ever wanted to try out other operating systems, perhaps another
version of Linux, but didn’t want to be bothered with partitioning
your disk? You could just load everything up on another machine,
but maybe your don’t have another machine to play with. If any of
this sounds like you, head on over to the following URL and pick up
your own copy of Bochs…”

Complete
Story