How it works

v86 emulates a full x86 PC — CPU, BIOS, disk controller and video — in WebAssembly, so a real operating system can run inside a web page. On your first visit the browser downloads the small engine (a few MB) and the Debian disk image (~1.5 GB) — you'll see a live progress meter with the percentage and megabytes. The disk, kernel and initrd are then cached in your browser's local storage, so every visit after that loads instantly with no re-download.

You can also make your changes stick: click Save VM state to write the VM's disk back to your browser, and it will be restored on your next visit. Use Reset to fresh image to discard your saved state and start clean, or Clear cached data to free the storage. The kernel boots, systemd starts, and you get a real shell on the serial console.

What you can do

This image ships with vim, nano, git, curl, python3 and htop pre-installed. Try uname -a to see the kernel, ls / to explore the filesystem, or python3 to drop into the interpreter. The VM is offline, so apt-get install won't work — everything you need is already on the disk.

Performance notes

v86 is a software emulator, so it runs much slower than native Linux — expect boot to take around a minute and commands to feel sluggish. It's built for learning and exploration, not for heavy work. A faster machine and a modern browser (Chrome, Edge or Firefox) help a lot.