HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
copy
v86
JavaScript2013–2026
copy / v86

v86

x86 PC emulator and x86-to-wasm JIT, running in the browser

68Distinct people
75Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
23.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

x86 PC emulator and x86-to-wasm JIT, running in the browser

GitHub

Where it is used

The source check is incomplete. Verified examples will appear here.

What people are saying

One of the things I love from this post is the collaboration on this kind of OSS projects. Making Postgres Wasm helped: - v86[0] to find a new bug - Providing a great deep-dive…

angelmm used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:28:18 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year75 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-11-06 00:16:59 UTC to 2026-07-25 22:20:31 UTC.

051015202013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 2 submissions, 6 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 2 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 21 mentions; 2 submissions, 19 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 2 submissions, 5 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC826
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC422
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC21219
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC725
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
or #v86 on irc.libera.chat v86 emulates an x86-compatible CPU and hardware. Machine code is translated to WebAssembly modules at runtime in order to achieve decent performance. Here's a list of emulated hardware: An x86-compatible CPU. The instruction set is around Pentium 4 level, including full SSE3 support. Some features are missing, in particular: Task gates, far calls in protected mode Some 16 bit protected mode features Single stepping (trap flag, debug registers) Some exceptions, especially floating point and SSE Multicore 64-bit extensions A floating point unit (FPU). Calculations are done using the Berkeley SoftFloat library and therefore should be precise (but slow). Trigonometric and log functions are emulated using 64-bit floats and may be less precise. Not all FPU exceptions are supported. A floppy disk controller (8272A). An 8042 Keyboard Controller, PS2. With mouse support. An 8254 Programmable Interval Timer (PIT). An 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC). Partial APIC support. A CMOS Real Time Clock (RTC). A generic VGA card with SVGA support and Bochs VBE Extensions. A PCI bus. This one is partly incomplete and not used by every device. An IDE disk controller. A built-in ISO 9660 CD-ROM generator with Joliet support. An NE2000 (RTL8390) PCI network card. Various virtio devices: Filesystem, network and balloon. A SoundBlaster 16 sound card. A hayes-compatible dial-up Modem. Demos 9front — Arch Linux — Android-x86 1.6-r2 — Android-x86 4.4-r2 — BasicLinux — Buildroot Linux — Damn Small Linux — ELKS — FreeDOS — FreeBSD — FiwixOS — Haiku — SkiffOS — ReactOS — Windows 2000 — Windows 98 — Windows 95 — Windows 1.01 — MS-DOS 6.22 — OpenBSD — Oberon — KolibriOS — SkiftOS — QNX Documentation How it works — Networking — Dial-up modem networking — Alpine Linux guest setup — Arch Linux guest setup — Debian with xfce guest setup — MS-DOS/FreeDOS guest setup — Windows 3.1x guest setup — Windows 9x guest setup — Windows NT guest setup — 9p filesystem — Linux rootfs on 9p — Profiling Compatibility Here's an overview of the operating systems supported in v86: Linux works pretty well. 64-bit kernels are not supported. Buildroot can be used to build a minimal image. humphd/browser-vm and darin755/browser-buildroot have some useful scripts for building one. SkiffOS (based on Buildroot) can cross-compile a custom image. Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives works up to the latest version that supported i386 (16.04 LTS or 18.04 LTS for some variants). Alpine Linux works. An image can be built from a Dockerfile, see tools/docker/alpine/. Arch Linux 32 works. See archlinux.md for building an image. ReactOS works. FreeDOS, Windows 1.01 and MS-DOS run very well. KolibriOS works. Haiku works. Android-x86 has been tested up to 4.4-r2. Windows 1, 3.x, 95, 98, ME, NT and 2000 work reasonably well. In Windows 2000 and higher the PC type has to be changed from ACPI PC to Standard PC There are some known boot issues (#250, #433, #507, #555, #620, #645) See Windows 9x guest setup Windows XP, Vista and 8 work under certain conditions (see #86, #208) See Windows NT guest setup Many hobby operating systems work. 9front works. Plan 9 doesn't work. QNX works. OS/2 doesn't work. FreeBSD works. OpenBSD works with a specific boot configuration. At the boot> prompt type boot -c, then at the UKC> prompt disable mpbios and exit. NetBSD works only with a custom kernel, see #350. SerenityOS works (only 32-bit versions). SkiftOS works. You can get some information on the disk images here: https://github.com/copy/images. How to build, run and embed? You need: make Rust with the wasm32-unknown-unknown target A version of clang compatible with Rust java (for Closure Compiler, not necessary when using debug.html) nodejs (a recent version is required, v24.16 is known to be working) To run tests: nasm, gdb, qemu-system, gcc, libc-i386 and rustfmt See tools/docker/test-image/Dockerfile for a full setup on Debian or WSL. Run make to build the debug build (at debug.html). Run make all to build the optimized build (at index.html). ROM and disk images are loaded via XHR, so if you want to try out index.html locally, make sure to serve it from a local webserver. You can use make run to serve the files using Python's http module. If you only want to embed v86 in a webpage you can use libv86.js. For usage, check out the examples. You can download it from the release section. For bundler-based setups (Vite/React/Next/Webpack), there is also an official npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/v86 This package was originally maintained by @giulioz (bundler-optimized fork) and was made "official" for this repo by @basicer with the author's permission. It is published automatically from this repository via GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/ci.yml, Upload release job) on pushes to master and uses npm publish --provenance. Install: npm install v86 Alternatively, to build using Docker If you have Docker installed, you can run the whole system inside a container. See tools/docker/exec to find the Dockerfile required for this. You can run docker build -f tools/docker/exec/Dockerfile -t v86:alpine-3.19 . from the root directory to generate docker image. Then you can simply run docker run -it -p 8000:8000 v86:alpine-3.19 to start the server. Check localhost:8000 for hosted server. Running via Dev Container If you are using an IDE that supports Dev Containers, such as GitHub Codespaces, the Visual Studio Code Remote Container extension, or possibly others such as Jetbrains' IntelliJ IDEA, you can setup the development environment in a Dev Container. Follow the instructions from your development environment to setup the container. Run the Task "Fetch images" in order to download images for testing. Testing The disk images for testing are not included in this repository. You can download them directly from the website using: mkdir -p images && curl --compressed --output-dir images/ --remote-name-all htt
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

6 sources
Author of the repo here. I didn't expect to see this come up again, it was a weekend project done years ago while I was studying x86 internals and emulation. There are much cleaner emulators to study in JS: for the x86 family, I recommend v86 https://github.com/copy/v86 For general emulation, RISC architectures are much simpler to understand, jor1k https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k performs very well, and can simulate the OpenRISC 1000 architecture as well as RISC-V (32bit only). There's also the 64bit ANGEL emulator for RISC-V http://riscv.org/angel/ All of these are probably more useful pedagogically than my hand-unrolled jslinux repo, unless you're particularly interested in that emulator. I would love to see such js emulators one-day used in operating-systems courses, allowing one to step through bootloaders and kernel init code to g
Read the rest
et a real feel for the code, along with other dynamic illustrations of the machine state and various kernel data structures on the same page. If I weren't devoted full-time to synthetic biology I might be tempted to try such a thing myself!
In JSLinux rewritten to be human readable, hand deobfuscated and annotated

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.