Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

infoq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 420 posts

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#31

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

riskyfive wrote: post #22
jchw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting take considering Linux is Unix-like and macOS is technically a BSD derivative. I don’t think macOS will ever have a Linux syscall translation layer/subsystem (WSL1) nor a lightweight VM with special integration (WSL2) but you can do sort of similar things in third party software, I think. Docker for Mac is using the native VM framework and includes a filesystem integration called osxfs, but des…

doesn't macOS put a BSD translation of some sort in their kernel? Theres a microkernel, a driver api (device kit) and then 'bsd'

Darwin doesn't use a microkernel, but yeah they straight-up grafted a BSD syscall layer onto a Mach base.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#32

Post by mehrdadn »

cgb223 wrote: post #27
jchw wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree wholeheartedly. I know it was probably a fool’s errand especially in a world where Docker for Windows was doing the same thing WSL2 does but worse, but WSL1’s design just satisfied me in a way that Hyper-V will not. Presumably, this also means you have to have Hyper-V enabled, crippling all other VM software. Hope the integration is impressive at least, to hopefully make up for it. I admittedly don’t run Wind…

> Presumably, this also means you have to have Hyper-V enabled, crippling all other VM software How does hyper-V cripple other VM software? I just had to enable it to use a prebuilt VM I need, now I’m a little worried

Last time I checked (months ago) VirtualBox just couldn't run under Hyper-V. If you Google around you'll see lots of threads, e.g. https://superuser.com/q/1208850

Apparently they claim that as of February 19, 2020, they've "Restored the ability to run VMs through Hyper-V, at the expense of performance". https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.1

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#34

Post by gdulli »

ahupp wrote: post #7

I switched to WSL2 a month ago and it's been great. With WSL1 I'd regularly run into subtle compatibility problems but haven't seen anything like that with 2. Despite a handful of annoyances, the Win10+WSL2+Visual Studio Code Dev environment has been a lot more pleasant than OSX.

That's good to hear. I use VirtualBox to develop on a real Linux VM from Windows and if this lets me get rid of an Oracle product, I'm happy.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#35

Post by monocasa »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #24
derekp7 wrote: post #14

Question -- from what I understand, WSL2 is closer to Linux running in a VM, whereas WSL1 was like a Windows kernel level version of Cygwin. Is that mostly correct? Regarding that, remember a number of years ago, prior to VMs there was a patch set for the Linux kernel porting it to user space -- so you could run Linux as a user process, which ended up functioning similar to running it in a VM. Would WSL2 be closer to…

> Question -- from what I understand, WSL2 is closer to Linux running in a VM, whereas WSL1 was like a Windows kernel level version of Cygwin. Is that mostly correct? Yes, that's essentially correct. You could also think of it as WINE in reverse; one big difference from cygwin is that it runs unmodified binaries rather than needing to recompile. > prior to VMs there was a patch set for the Linux kernel porting it to…

> which I think is still a thing, although not super popular.

Yeah, I compiled a version last week. It's occasionally nice for kernel devs to have an env to try out new ideas, so it more or less gets maintained.

Google's gvisor project is sort of a blend of that and WSL. A reimplementation of the linux syscall layer like WSL, but as a linux process like UML instead of as a kernel module as in WSL.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#37

Post by sdegutis »

cgb223 wrote: post #27
jchw wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree wholeheartedly. I know it was probably a fool’s errand especially in a world where Docker for Windows was doing the same thing WSL2 does but worse, but WSL1’s design just satisfied me in a way that Hyper-V will not. Presumably, this also means you have to have Hyper-V enabled, crippling all other VM software. Hope the integration is impressive at least, to hopefully make up for it. I admittedly don’t run Wind…

> Presumably, this also means you have to have Hyper-V enabled, crippling all other VM software How does hyper-V cripple other VM software? I just had to enable it to use a prebuilt VM I need, now I’m a little worried

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-ux-changes

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#39

Post by nyanpasu64 »

sk5t wrote: post #10

Is there a shell+terminal+font combo that folks really like for WSL? I've tried the new terminal beta with zsh and--for reasons I can't quite articulate right now--it feels "off" and I invariably proceed to boot up virtualbox for my debian, i3, kitty, fira code setup to get work done. Maybe it's the break in filesystems and $HOME? Edit: learning that WSL2 does away with the syscall-translating tech and mandates Hyper…

Windows Terminal uses grayscale instead of subpixel antialiasing by default. They recently added the ability to turn on subpixel antialiasing. (I'm not sure if that's what you mean by "off".)

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#40

Post by mehrdadn »

saagarjha wrote: post #2

> He further mentions that unzipping tarbars could see a 20 times performance increase. Boy, do I love unzipping tarbars! On a more serious note, it’s great that WSL has gotten much faster, although it’s a little disappointing that they threw out the older, more interesting architecture to get it and just used a VM.

The things I liked the most about WSL were the ability to share the same file system (and RAM, etc.) and not have to care about partitioning any resources. And to search the Linux files on the Windows side and even modify them with tools that can handle them (yes, I know what I'm doing). Now all of that goes out the window(s)... so I'm pretty unenthusiastic about WSL2. And the 9P server has been next to useless for me on WSL1. It's so darn slow for a local filesystem, it's almost like accessing files over SMB.
Post reply on HN