VMWare PC emulator |
| VMWare is a commercial i386 PC Emulator. (Think BOCHS, without
all the nasty bugs or setup hassles).
Unlike Bochs, it does not have a built in debugger, but it is far more 'compatible' and a more complete emulator. You can get it from www.vmware.com |
Bochs (i386) PC emulator |
| Bochs is the name of an i386 pc emulator.. and I have to say its
very impressive! Bochs can emulate an i386 pc so good you can boot
linux inside of Windows NT.
Its a great development tool and free for non commercial use. It uses disk images, so you can put your kernel onto a floppy disk or hard disk image (file) and boot it via that. It lessense the time you have to physically boot and reboot your PC to test your OS code. There are SOME drawbacks. It only supports a basic i386 pc with FPU. There is no PNP or PCI (as of current version). You can get this kickass program from www.bochs.com |
MTools (DOS disk image tools) |
| MTools! MTools started life as unix tools to manipulate MSDOS formatted
floppy disk images. There is now a win32 port available.
This is good for distributing your OS to other people, you can supply a disk image with your kernel on it very easily. MTools make the maintenance of your disk image very easy. Point to note is, MTools only work with dos FAT12/16 and VFAT filesystems and not FAT32. MTools for Win32 is available at; http://www.v.nu/core/Mtools/index.htm |
SimISC : Sparc v8 simulator |
| SimICS emulates a Sparc V8 (supersparc) compatible processor and a sun4m system (sparcstation 20). It is able to run linux and SunOS. I'm currently developing a kernel based on the exokernel architecture using SimICS as a debugging tool.
The only problem is that SimICS runs on a Ultra sparc system... You can download SimISC from here; (The above was taken from a post from the OS-Dev web message board) |