¿Qué es una máquina virtual temporal?

Una máquina virtual temporal es un ordenador virtual desechable que vive solo mientras lo usas. En TempMV se ejecuta dentro de tu navegador y desaparece al recargar la página.

¿Necesito instalar algo o crear una cuenta?

No. TempMV funciona íntegramente en el navegador con WebAssembly. No hay instalación, ni cuenta, ni servidor: tus imágenes nunca se suben a ningún sitio.

Glossary

The vocabulary used across this site, defined plainly — from boot sectors and range requests to microkernels and WebAssembly.

9p: A network filesystem protocol from Plan 9 that the Linux kernel speaks natively. Lets a guest mount a root filesystem served over HTTP, fetching individual files on demand instead of reading a disk image.
ACPI: The standard by which firmware describes power management and hardware layout to an operating system. Some systems need it to shut down cleanly; older ones get confused by it.
BIOS: The firmware that runs first when an x86 PC powers on. It initialises hardware, then loads the first 512 bytes of the first bootable device and jumps into them. Superseded by UEFI on modern machines.
Boot order: The sequence of devices the BIOS tries when looking for something to boot. The first device with a valid boot sector wins; the rest are never consulted.
Boot sector: The first 512 bytes of a disk. If its last two bytes are 0x55 0xAA, the BIOS considers the disk bootable and executes it. That is the entire test.
bzImage: A compressed Linux kernel image that can be booted directly, with no bootloader and no disk. The emulator loads it into memory and jumps to it.
CORS: The browser rule that a site may only read data from another origin if that origin explicitly permits it. Disk images hosted without CORS headers cannot be loaded, no matter how they are linked.
Disk image: A file holding the exact bytes a disk would contain — not the files on it, but the disk itself, including boot sector and partition table. Usually .iso, .img or .bin.
Emulation: Imitating hardware in software, so that programs written for it run unmodified. Slower than virtualisation, but works on any host regardless of its processor.
Ephemeral: Existing only for the duration of use. An ephemeral machine keeps nothing after it closes — no disk, no state, no trace.
Guest: The operating system running inside the virtual machine, as opposed to the host, which is the system running the emulator. Here the host is your browser.
Hypervisor: The layer that creates and runs virtual machines, mediating their access to hardware. v86 is a hypervisor implemented entirely in the browser.
initrd: A small filesystem the kernel unpacks into RAM and uses as its first root, before any real disk is available. Paired with a bzImage when there is no disk at all.
ISO: A CD or DVD image. Read-only by nature, which is why live systems ship this way: the medium forces them to be self-contained.
JIT: Just-in-time compilation. Rather than interpreting guest instructions one at a time, hot code is translated once into the host's native form and reused. It is why an emulated machine speeds up after its first seconds.
Kernel: The core of an operating system: the part that manages memory, schedules processes and talks to hardware. Everything else is a program running on top of it.
Live system: An operating system that runs directly from removable media without being installed, usually loading itself entirely into RAM.
Microkernel: A kernel design that keeps only the essentials in privileged mode and runs drivers and filesystems as ordinary processes. More robust — a crashing driver takes nothing with it — at some cost in speed. MINIX, Redox and HelenOS are microkernels.
Protected mode: The 32-bit x86 operating mode with memory protection and virtual memory. The kernel switches into it early in boot and never goes back.
Range request: An HTTP request for a specific byte range of a file rather than the whole thing. It is what lets a 1 GB disk image boot after downloading a few megabytes.
Real mode: The 16-bit mode every x86 processor starts in, for compatibility with the 8086 from 1978. No memory protection, and about a megabyte addressable.
Snapshot: A complete capture of a running machine — registers, memory, device state and modified disk sectors — that can be restored later to resume exactly where it left off.
UEFI: The modern replacement for the BIOS. Not emulated here, which is why systems that require it have nothing to boot from.
v86: The open-source x86 emulator this site runs on. It emulates a 32-bit PC and compiles guest machine code to WebAssembly on the fly.
VGA: The graphics standard from 1987 that every PC still supports at boot. The emulated card here is a plain framebuffer, with no 3D acceleration.
Virtual machine: A computer built out of software: an emulated processor, memory, disk and display, on which an unmodified operating system can run.
Virtualisation: Running guest code directly on the host processor with hardware assistance, rather than simulating each instruction. Much faster than emulation, but requires the guest and host to share an architecture. Not available in a browser.
WebAssembly: A low-level binary format browsers execute at close to native speed. It is what makes emulating a processor in a tab practical rather than merely possible.
x86: The processor architecture that has run PCs since 1978. Here it is emulated in its 32-bit form; 64-bit code will not run.
zstd: A compression format used for the pre-booted snapshots in the catalog, decompressed by the emulator itself as it loads them.