Linux in the Browser

Boot a real Linux kernel entirely inside this tab using v86, an x86 PC emulator compiled to WebAssembly. No server, no VM host, no plugin — just a sandboxed virtual machine running client-side.

Idle — click "Boot Linux" to download the kernel image and start the virtual machine.

Click Boot Linux above to download the disk image and start the virtual machine.

About this tool

This boots a real, unmodified Linux kernel inside your browser tab. v86 emulates a full x86-compatible PC — CPU, FPU, VGA card, PS/2 keyboard/mouse, IDE disk controller — by recompiling guest machine code to WebAssembly at runtime. On top of that emulated hardware, a small BusyBox-based Linux distro (built with Buildroot for v86's official demos) boots exactly as it would on real hardware. Everything — CPU emulation, RAM, the virtual disk — lives in this browser tab's memory. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing here can touch your real machine or filesystem.

How it works

x86-to-WebAssembly JIT — v86's libv86 and its WASM core (loaded from jsDelivr) translate guest instructions to WASM on the fly.
BIOS + kernel — a SeaBIOS/VGA BIOS pair boots a Linux kernel and BusyBox userland packaged as a bootable ISO (~5.4 MB), fetched straight into memory.
No networking, no persistence — the guest has no network card wired up and its disk is RAM-backed, so nothing you do inside the VM leaves your tab or survives a refresh.
Real keyboard/mouse emulation — input you send while the screen is focused is delivered to the emulated PS/2 controller, exactly like a real BIOS-era PC.

Things to try once it boots

The VM drops you straight into a root shell — no login required.
uname -a — see the emulated kernel version.
cat /proc/cpuinfo — inspect the virtual CPU v86 presents to the guest.
ls -la / and free -m — poke around the filesystem and emulated RAM.
dmesg | less — read the full boot log (space to page, q to quit).

Notes

First boot downloads the WASM core, BIOS images, and disk image (~8 MB total) from public CDNs — give it a few seconds on a slower connection.
This is 32-bit, single-core x86 emulation — plenty for a shell, not for anything graphics- or CPU-heavy.
Power Off destroys the VM and frees its memory; Restart reboots the same running instance without re-downloading anything.
v86 is BSD-2-Clause licensed; the Linux kernel and BusyBox userland inside the image are GPL-licensed open source projects.