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Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

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Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#183

Post by sz4kerto »

AaronFriel wrote: post #140

In WSL1, running "wsl git status" on a moderately sized repo on an NTFS (Windows side) drive or SMB file share is nearly instantaneous. In WSL2, running the same command takes over 30 seconds. WSL2 is a massive hit to the seemless experience between the two operating systems with filesystem performance from Linux to Windows files orders of magnitude worse. Yes, unzipping tarballs or manipulating and stat syscalls are…

WSL2 is really not designed for using Linux tools on your NTFS-based filesystem. Store everything on the WSL filesystem, that works perfectly. If you need GUI tools try VcXsrv.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#185

Post by stinos »

hexagonsun wrote: post #111

honestly, i use WSL to ssh into servers in a pinch and get things taken care of... my experience actually trying to develop things (python/django/node) has been poor otherwise.

If it's just ssh, what's the benefit over using it on WSL compared to using the native ssh in Windows?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#186

Post by davnn »

chx wrote: post #96
juped wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL was very cool from a pure tech standpoint, but I've never been clear what the actual use case for it was. WSL2 seems to be more along the lines of coLinux, which I felt the same way about when it was new.

Well, if you want to use multimedia and do web development on the same machine, what are you going to do? Linux support is somewhere between nonexistent and utterly broken for the first one and the same can be said for the second on Windows. So your choices are, 1. run Linux primary, put Windows in a VM 2. run Windows primary and put Linux in a VM 3. Give up and just run a separate Linux server.

What problems did you experience in web development on Windows? I worked with Linux, Mac and Windows, but I didn‘t have any problems on any platform with a typical modern webpack/react/angular/typescript/elm etc.. stack. Even docker support with Hyper-V is okay imho.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#187

Post by Zekio »

dleslie wrote: post #171
AaronFriel wrote: post #140

In WSL1, running "wsl git status" on a moderately sized repo on an NTFS (Windows side) drive or SMB file share is nearly instantaneous. In WSL2, running the same command takes over 30 seconds. WSL2 is a massive hit to the seemless experience between the two operating systems with filesystem performance from Linux to Windows files orders of magnitude worse. Yes, unzipping tarballs or manipulating and stat syscalls are…

My git status/add/commit/push cycle has gone from seconds to minutes in length. It's unbearable and I'm going to abandon wsl as a result. Shame, it was really good.

why not use git natively? I've never understood why people use git in WSL since the IO performance isn't great

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#188

Post by mehrdadn »

eropple wrote: post #160
mehrdadn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shrinks the VHD automatically?? And yes the \\wsl$ is the 9P server I just tried to explain is incredibly slow compared to normal files on WSL1. I haven't tried WSL2 yet but I don't expect going through a VM would be faster.

I've never looked as to whether it shrinks it, but I assume not (that would be hard). OTOH, storage is cheap, so I've never really worried. I never used WSL1 in anger, but accessing WSL2 over the \\wsl$ is not particularly slow. It's not as fast as native, but I don't notice it. I do almost all of my access of files on the Linux image via a terminal and VSCode-over-WSL-Remote, though.

Well "storage is cheap" for you but why assume my money and everyone else's is cheap? I'm low on space and I need to shell out hundreds of dollars to get a larger version of what I have just to use WSL2. Or I could just keep using WSL1 and save my money, especially in this economy. Why in the world would I get a new SSD just for WSL2?

This isn't about using it "in anger". I'm not pushing it to some kind of corner case, you just need to use it for real instead of trying hello-world examples. You notice this immediately as you're dealing with nontrivial folder contents. To give you an idea, this is the speed of raw grep from inside WSL1 Ubuntu:

  $ time sudo grep -ri asfadsfadf /etc
  real    0m0.075s
  user    0m0.016s
  sys     0m0.063s
This is the speed from \\wsl$ (MSYS2):

  real    0m9.227s
  user    0m0.078s
  sys     0m0.561s
And this is the speed on the raw files from Windows (MSYS2):

  real    0m0.092s
  user    0m0.000s
  sys     0m0.046s
\\wsl$ is literally some 60x-70x slower than direct access, and it's not because I'm "using it in anger". If you don't believe me, try it yourself with any program you prefer and see if you get similar speed before you tell me I'm wrong.

This is par for the course on \\wsl$. Explorer lags, too, if you try to browse a folder with a bunch of subfolders that actually have some contents. It's plain as daylight to me. Not noticing to me is like not noticing that your car suddenly goes 1mph instead of 65mph.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#189

Post by quotemstr »

chx wrote: post #59

I am giving up. 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 flav…

NT supports process monitoring, inspection, and alteration in a manner that's already basically a superset of ptrace. As I mentioned in another comment, I can imagine some internal resistance to adding the necessary hooks for complete support eventually making WSL1 infeasible to support --- but for social infeasibility, not technical infeasibility.

Big companies that employ lots of smart people frequently seize up and become incapable of innovating because their internal parts mesh against each other and halt the whole machine. I suspect that's what happened here.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#190

Post by jmiskovic »

chx wrote: post #167
theevilsharpie wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Linux multimedia story improves significantly if you avoid Nvidia GPU hardware. My work desktop (AMD Radeon) and laptop (Intel HD Graphics) work fine, and perform as the hardware should.

Sound and bluetooth , like , works now? That wasn't my experience back then. Both of them were entire stacks of spaghetti.

This seems like comment from early 2000s. I don't remember last time I head problems with BT or sound, and I went through dozen of installations in last 3 years (for me and others). I had to give up on Nvidia drivers but Intel graphics serves me great.
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