51–60 of 420 posts
> 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.
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…
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…
Kind of. But from a userland perspective, Cygwin is a (very slow and complicated) layer between the application and the kernel, whereas WSL1 really is (and importantly, feels) like just another API for the exact same kernel. That's kind of its entire advantage over Cygwin, so I wouldn't really compare them like that.
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…
WSL (1) was what the BSD people call a "kernel personality", which allows one kernel to emulate another at the syscall and ABI level.
This was why I have finally switched away from developing on windows, there's something about the VS remote code server setup that will spawn tons of processes and eventually slow WSL to a crawl. Possibly my fault, I haven't gone through all my extensions and settings carefully, but also not an issue when running VS code on unix without the server.
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 is made by the same guys working on WSL and works pretty well: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal You can get it via the Microsoft Store and it comes with support for connecting to WSL, Powershell, and cmd.exe out of the box.
WSL1 was a great invention but Microsoft gave up on it, either because of the filesystem performance problems or because of the debuggers. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2028 (lldb, rr, delve all affected). This looks like a dreaded case of the first 90% is easy, it's the second 90% that is hard. Imagine implementing a translator for a vast majority of Linux syscalls just to find certain flavors of ptrace are just not doable. I do not have insider knowledge to ascertain this happened but this would be my educated guess.
WSL2 is a VM like any other VM with an uncertain promise for better networking experience and even less certain promise for cross OS file performance which is much, much worse than WSL1 which was already abominable. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197#issuecomment-60...
It was a very nice dream, pity it didn't work out.
Because I am using an eGPU Windows 10 needs to stay as the primary OS on the laptop. I bought a little fanless machine from Aliexpress (with laptop-like hardware) for I guess https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/am10z3/success_thunde... could be a solution if I wanted to go back to Linux primary but I really badly don't want to. Constant hardware headaches were par for the course -- I was solely Linux 2004-2017. I don't want to be again. If there would be a cheap remote sysadmin service... but it doesn't exist. QuadraNet will sysop a server for $39 a month, that'd be awesome for a laptop... but I have never seen anyone doing that.
> 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.
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…
This is being addressed, as discussed by commenter below [1] and at [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22874047
[2] https://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2020/01/vmware-workstat...