Ubuntu on Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#61

Post by sabarn01 » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

sabarn01 wrote: post #23

abritishguy wrote: post #19

I wonder how buggy thus is. For example, how do symlinks work given windows doesn't have an equivalent that behaves the same.

Windows does have symlinks and hardlinks that work very similarly but are only exposed via a built in cmd command. That said no one uses them.

I was being a little over dramatic windows has like 1B installs obviously someone "uses" them.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#62

Post by Keyframe » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

Sweet baby Jesus. If this can alleviate at least half of the issues running cygwin/babun/msys/whatnots... Namely, 64-bitness, speed, and repository madness.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#63

Post by jdub » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

zymhan wrote: post #4

"Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows. Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux"." I find it amazing that you can have such a functional Ubuntu environment by translating system calls. Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-source I suppose, while the Wine project had to reverse engineer DLLs. Or have you supply them on yo…

Windows NT was designed from the start to have modular subsystems. It was most infamously used to provide a POSIX subsystem which really only checked boxes on government acquisition forms. :-)

The reason WINE went with the library emulation route is because: (a) the Windows kernel doesn't have a stable system call layer, and (b) the Win32 API is massive anyway.

Windows has an easier time emulating Linux at the very lowest levels because Linux has an ABI stable system call layer. If you emulate those, you can run ANY Linux binary.

It also means Microsoft doesn't have to ship or support hundreds of Open Source projects. They ship the syscall layer, and distributions ship the user layer.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#64

Post by josephpmay » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

hodwik wrote: post #48

How in God's green earth did Canonical think helping Microsoft with this was a good idea for the Linux community?

-It solidifies Bash as the dev. shell of choice

-It facilitates app cross comparability

-For Canonical, it reinforces the idea that Ubuntu == Linux, which is really good for their bottom line

-I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft forked over a solid amount of cash

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#65

Post by look_lookatme » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:43 PM UTC

What is up with the unix-y directory structure in this screenshot?

http://o.aolcdn.com/dims-global/dims3/GLOB/resize/1345x666/q...

It's been a while since I've used Windows but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a unix directory structure... is it the case that they map / to a folder inside windows?

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#66

Post by jdub » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:43 PM UTC

msoad wrote: post #8

So what OS you're going to get when you run an application under this? So if I run this: node -e 'console.log(require("os").type())' What it's going to print?

As WinLS is very much like branded Solaris Zones, here's what it looks like when you run `uname -a` in an (old, copypasta from the web) Linux branded zone:

    Linux centos 2.4.21 BrandZ fake linux i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#67

Post by meursault334 » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

This seems like it could be pretty amazing for developing and testing some of our backend computer vision tools directly in Windows.

What would be really amazing would be if you could use CUDA and cuDNN from Ubuntu executables in Windows 10.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#68

Post by typon » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

frozenport wrote: post #60

I don't get it. What's the use case for a few core utilities running natively?

It's not a 'few' core utilities. It's any packages available on Ubuntu.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#69

Post by jdub » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:46 PM UTC

frozenport wrote: post #60

I don't get it. What's the use case for a few core utilities running natively?

You can run any* Linux binary on WinLS, including apt-get in the Ubuntu rootfs.

* within the probably surprisingly broad limits of the WinLS syscall emulation, though it wouldn't support niche OS config stuff, SELinux calls, etc.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#70

Post by geofft » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:46 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #52

wernercd wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still "VM" not "Native". You aren't running them "side by side"... you are running them "One inside the other". Not exactly an apple-to-apple comparison.

The performance hit is so negligible on modern hardware that the distinction doesn't really matter.

And the performance hit is almost certainly less than the relative performance of a "native" reimplementation of a foreign OS's syscalls that doesn't benefit from the decades of engineering work that went into making that foreign OS perform well.