2.1. Overview

The initial versions of some sections in this chapter are based on a document written by Peter "Firefly" Lund. It was added and updated in January 2006.

The Bochs virtual PC consists of many pieces of hardware. At a bare minimum there are always a CPU, a PIT (Programmable Interval Timer), a PIC (Programmable Interrupt Controller), a DMA controller, some memory (this includes both RAM and BIOS ROMs), a video card (usually VGA), a keyboard port (also handles the mouse), an RTC with battery backed NVRAM, and some extra motherboard circuitry.

There might also be a NE2K ethernet card, a PCI controller, a Sound Blaster 16, an IDE controller (+ harddisks/CDROM), a SCSI controller (+ harddisks), a floppy controller, an APIC ..

There may also be more than one CPU.

Most of these pieces of hardware have their own C++ class - and if Bochs is configured to have more than one piece of a type of hardware, each will have its own object.

The pieces of hardware communicates over a couple of buses with each other - some of the things that the buses carry are reads and writes in memory space, reads and writes in I/O space, interrupt requests, interrupt acknowledges, DMA requests, DMA acknowledges, and NMI request/acknowledge. How that is simulated is explained later.

Other important pieces of the puzzle are: the options object (reads/writes configuration files, can be written to and queried while Bochs is running) and the GUI object. There are many different but compatible implementations of the GUI object, depending on whether you compile for X (Unix/Linux), Win32, Macintosh (two versions: one for Mac OS X and one for older OS's), BeOS, Amiga, etc.

And then there is the supporting cast: debugger, config menu, panic handler, disassembler, tracer, instrumentation.