Table of Contents

Running Etherboot within Bochs

Orginal documentation by Michael Brown mbrown@fensystems.co.uk Based on an idea suggested by H. Peter Anvin hpa@zytor.com Wikified By Tim Fletcher tim@parrswood.manchester.sch.uk Reformatted by Anselm M. Hoffmeister

What is Bochs?

Bochs is a program that simulates a complete Intel x86 computer, including hardware. It can be used to test Etherboot. There is a special pseudo NIC (“pnic”) implemented in Bochs, with a corresponding driver in Etherboot. (There is also an NE2000 ISA driver in Bochs, but it doesn't seem to quite work.)

Getting Bochs running

Serial console

You can use the program serial-console to obtain a virtual serial console for Etherboot running within Bochs. Simply run

./serial-console

on a spare tty (e.g. a separate xterm window) before starting Bochs, and ensure that you have compiled Etherboot with appropriate settings such as

  CFLAGS+=      -DCONSOLE_DUAL -DCOMCONSOLE=0x3F8 -DCONSPEED=9600

There is a manual page for serial-console; use

man ./serial-console.1

to view it.

TODO

Further information

… about Etherboot as extension ROM for Bochs is available.