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Initial Impressions of WSL 2

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Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#121

Post by shawnz »

sebazzz wrote: post #109
shawnz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL 2 can't coexist with other virtual machine software though (unless it leverages Hyper-V)

Good chance that your other VM software can't co-exist anyway. Many other technologies, Windows Defender among others, leverage virtualization through Hyper-V.

Hyper-V is not installed by default on Windows and I have not been required to install it for anything except WSL 2 (and Hyper-V itself).

I think Docker on Windows also uses it but I don't use that. Windows Defender has never indicated a requirement for Hyper-V to me.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#122

Post by bcrosby95 »

yebyen wrote: post #106
dataflow wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure I believe them. I'm not sure why anyone should. They literally say "We currently have no plans to deprecate WSL 1" while simultaneously claiming "We are committed to making WSL 2 feel the same as WSL 1" . There's no way their goal is to reach a steady state where they feel the same and yet both have to be maintained. Making them feel the same is literally what you do when your goal is to stop support f…

I watched Aaron Patterson's keynote from RailsConf 2020 (these talks all just came out this week, Couch Edition) and I'm struck when reading your comment that it's absolutely possible to do this, and ultimately you may or may not reach a state where it's possible to "end-of-life" one or the other alternative without making anyone cry about it. He spends most of the second half of the talk explaining (with a profiler)…

Sure. But I don't completely see the point. "bugs" you don't own are the worst bugs because you have no say on when or if they are getting fixed. I deal with such things on a fairly regular basis - our RDBMS (SQL Server) acting in pathological ways and when I look into it, people have been complaining about this stuff for a decade.

Ultimately, the software creator determines what is and isn't a bug - formally through what they label them as, but effectively through how they act upon the behavior. As an end user of a system, things like the above are less like bugs, and more like features.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#123

Post by pkulak »

helen___keller wrote: post #120

For the past couple years I've developed on macOS, and the few years before that in a different role, on windows. On both machines I ended up resorting to a Linux VM to avoid frustrating differences between my dev environment and my prod environment. Windows was totally off, macOS nearly just worked but every now and then an update would kill my dev environment and I would have to spend a day fixing it. WSL1 was tota…

I recent switched to a Linux desktop after doing the VM dance on MacOS for a few years and I can't believe I didn't do it sooner.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#124

Post by blackoil »

shawnz wrote: post #83
close04 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL 1 and WSL 2 can coexist and be used according to what needs one's scenarios present. I imagine MS collected enough requirements to also justify a full Linux VM. There will be some slowness somewhere, the 2 versions now let you choose on which side of the boundary to place it. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq

WSL 2 can't coexist with other virtual machine software though (unless it leverages Hyper-V)

Latest version of VirtualBox and VMWare support Hyper-V and Docker latest/beta supports WSL2. That should solve most use cases.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#125

Post by mehrdadn »

akho wrote: post #115
mehrdadn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's amazing/terrible. Would you have a link to a repro?

I think this is the relevant bug: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/2395 WSL2 has been great so far (I’ve been using it for a few months now with no serious issues).

Thanks!

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#126

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

shawnz wrote: post #86
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought it was a thin translation layer between the kernels? WSL1 was like that, but it was severely handicapped by NT filesystem performance, especially for small files or metadata operations. There are a lot of small operations that are more than 2 orders of magnitude slower on Windows than on Linux, and a lot of Linux software just expects them to be fast, so WSL1 is not a great experience for a lot of stuff.

Personally I never had a problem with filesystem performance on WSL 1. I certainly don't think it was so bad that the whole thing needed to be scrapped in favor of a virtual machine.

Try running Node on Windows. Even without WSL the poor NTFS performance is a serious drag.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#127

Post by michaelbuckbee »

GGfpc wrote: post #85
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tail wagging the dog incentives here. Part (not all) of the Mac resurgence was that you needed a Mac to develop iPhone apps. Part (not all) of the new Windows resurgence is that if you even really want to play around with ML or VR dev you need a Windows machine. I feel like it's about the possibilities - with WSL, Windows Terminal I get what's essentially the mac experience but can suddenly do so much more.

What makes windows better than osx for VR?

Most of the VR platforms just aren't supporting Mac b/c of the smaller playerbase, lack of higher end video card support and games support.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#128

Post by mehrdadn »

shawnz wrote: post #121
sebazzz wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good chance that your other VM software can't co-exist anyway. Many other technologies, Windows Defender among others, leverage virtualization through Hyper-V.

Hyper-V is not installed by default on Windows and I have not been required to install it for anything except WSL 2 (and Hyper-V itself). I think Docker on Windows also uses it but I don't use that. Windows Defender has never indicated a requirement for Hyper-V to me.

I think by Windows Defender they might've been thinking of the Sandbox?

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#129

Post by shawnz »

blackoil wrote: post #124
shawnz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL 2 can't coexist with other virtual machine software though (unless it leverages Hyper-V)

Latest version of VirtualBox and VMWare support Hyper-V and Docker latest/beta supports WSL2. That should solve most use cases.

I have had a number of problems trying to use the Hyper-V backend with VirtualBox. In my experience it has caused frequent crashing in my VMs which remains even after disabling Hyper-V.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#130

Post by yebyen »

mehrdadn wrote: post #119
yebyen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched Aaron Patterson's keynote from RailsConf 2020 (these talks all just came out this week, Couch Edition) and I'm struck when reading your comment that it's absolutely possible to do this, and ultimately you may or may not reach a state where it's possible to "end-of-life" one or the other alternative without making anyone cry about it. He spends most of the second half of the talk explaining (with a profiler)…

> But given enough time, perhaps they will fix the bugs, and the two can be made to perform similarly, fixing bugs on either side, and the need for two alternatives will go away. So why would that be bad? Because (possibly unlike with your Rails example?) the suggestion that this is possible to do by improving the VM side is, to be blunt, a lie. A VM is a fundamentally leaky abstraction, in far more ways than just th…

> Because (possibly unlike with your Rails example?) the suggestion that this is possible to do by improving the VM side is, to be blunt, a lie. A VM is a fundamentally leaky abstraction, in far more ways than just the timing behavior (i.e. performance), and they need for both won't go away by just "fixing" the VM side.

The fun part about my example is actually that he saw a 60% performance difference, but only recovered 38% of that by fixing the one bug that was exposed in the talk.

It was decidedly a bug. Refusing to cop out and say "it's a necessary evil, and can't be fixed" got him that 38% boost in one shot. The remaining ~22% is still a problem that has yet to be explained completely, but now it's not as big (or soon won't be, when they resolve the issues created by fixing the bug, which AIUI it couldn't be merged yet...)

I do get your point, and I grok that parts of this problem simply can't be fixed outright. But from my perspective, the bug isn't that WSL2 is missing features of WSL1, it's that WSL1 performs 60% slower for my use cases (*not an actual measurement) while doing what appears to be, at least from my perspective, basically what is meant to be the same task. I don't really know why, except by what some greater experts have shared, some of that which I have acquired by osmosis.

Your use cases are valid, and we mostly agree, when you say the limits of the technology have not been reached, it seems like we're both arguing that there are simply more bugs yet.

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