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I'm planning to write a simple bootloader. Nothing too complicated. Just really basic output and maybe keyboard input.
But it seems a bit crazy to restart my computer every time I want to run the bootloader. I have a vmware workstation license. Could I just create a VM and use it to boot my image or does vmware only support existing operating systems?
I also heard you can use "x86 emulators", but I have no idea which one I should get.

I'll use Ubuntu to write and compile the bootloader btw.

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  • Yes, you could. A simple search here will show you many people doing just that. – Sami Kuhmonen Apr 13 '16 at 12:29
  • I did more than one simple search. I couldn't find anything useful. – Forivin Apr 13 '16 at 12:38
  • Oh, my mind was on Stack Overflow. Search there and you'll see many people using different virtual machines for testing. – Sami Kuhmonen Apr 13 '16 at 12:38
  • Okay, thanks. Looks like Virtualbox is the way to go then. stackoverflow.com/questions/31257986/how-to-test-a-bootloader – Forivin Apr 13 '16 at 12:44
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There's a good getting-started tutorial here. In the tutorial they use QEMU, an x86 emulator. It's not a full-featured as VirtualBox, but if you're just testing a boot loader, it may be better as it's a more lightweight package and you'll probably be in a pretty tight edit->compile->test loop.

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