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Initial Impressions of WSL 2

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Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#171

Post by electricEmu »

unicornfinder wrote: post #2

I must say WSL2 has genuinely been huge for me, to the point where I've finally been able to ditch macOS for a desktop with a Ryzen CPU. Honestly it's mindblowing how far Windows has come - if I were Apple I'd genuinely be scared of losing a large proportion of power-users as Windows becomes an increasingly viable platform for development.

Windows can be controlled entirely by the keyboard, out of the box (Start+ArrowKey).

MacOS always required extra setup with Karabiner and other tools to mostly accomplish the same thing.

The BSD derived base in MacOS made a great developer OS but the windowing system often felt lacking.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#172

Post by fb1 »

Ive been using Docker Desktop with WSL2 and vscode for the past couple of weeks and its been pretty seamless so far. The performance has been great (on a ryzen 3600x PC and on my surface laptop 3), and was really easy to set up. I'm forced to use a Mac at work, and have generally dual booted to linux at home, but havent needed to so far.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#173

Post by httpsterio »

sandGorgon wrote: post #139
tyingq wrote: post #3

No free lunch, of course. Faster file access with WSL2 (vs WSL1), if you stay in the Linux world. But if you point it at Windows files (/mnt/c, etc), it's pretty slow. WSL2 just moved the slowness from one side to the other. Accessing the Linux FS from Windows (\\wsl$\) is also slow. That said, I am a fan, and get a lot of use out of WSL1. Since I don't use the Windows interop much, WSL2 should be a performance win f…

exactly this is the problem. As the article says > To get the full benefit of WSL 2, you’ll also want to move your project files from /mnt/c/Users/ / over to your new ~/ Linux home directory on your new VHD. You can see the contents of this drive on the Network by going to \\wsl$\ \ \home or typing the command explorer.exe . from your bash prompt. >This is your Linux filesystem and it acts and behaves as you’d expect…

Git? All of my work is backed up to git, even my dot files and config is there. For me, I try to keep my WSL "stateless" and never store anything there unless it's a copy of something.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#174

Post by sandGorgon »

httpsterio wrote: post #173
sandGorgon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly this is the problem. As the article says > To get the full benefit of WSL 2, you’ll also want to move your project files from /mnt/c/Users/ / over to your new ~/ Linux home directory on your new VHD. You can see the contents of this drive on the Network by going to \\wsl$\ \ \home or typing the command explorer.exe . from your bash prompt. >This is your Linux filesystem and it acts and behaves as you’d expect…

Git? All of my work is backed up to git, even my dot files and config is there. For me, I try to keep my WSL "stateless" and never store anything there unless it's a copy of something.

im running a postgresql database, building docker containers, etc etc.

this is a problem that needs a "docker volume" solution. git is just not enough.

think in terms of people moving to Windows from Linux.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#175

Post by e12e »

alibert wrote: post #154

Just a reminder that enabling Hyper-V (needed for WSL2) will make your computer boot your current Windows install inside a VM too. This might makes a slight performance impact. And you might also encounter issues with Type 2 virtualization software such as VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation. (I will still stick to WSL 1 because of that).

Any benchmarks on this? For laptops I'd be mostly interested in seeing battery tests - otherwise I guess a compiler benchmark, and some gaming numbers.

I'd be a little surprised if it really is measurable - just win10 with/without hyper-v? I seem to recall xen (which should be comparable) having a pretty low impact?

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#176

Post by runjake »

alibert wrote: post #154

Just a reminder that enabling Hyper-V (needed for WSL2) will make your computer boot your current Windows install inside a VM too. This might makes a slight performance impact. And you might also encounter issues with Type 2 virtualization software such as VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation. (I will still stick to WSL 1 because of that).

You may be right but:

1.) The Hyper-V component isn't installed on my Windows 20H1 install. WSL 2 may use Hyper-V technology, but the full thing does not appear to be installed.

2.) So far, VirtualBox is working just fine. I haven't noticed any issues yet while using several virtual machines. Nothing seems amiss at all.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#177

Post by chupasaurus »

Kudos wrote: post #155
driverdan wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use WSL2 instead of just running linux directly? Why do you need Windows in there?

Video games. Though I've finally got a second GPU and am working on passthrough from Linux to a Windows VM.

I've solved this problem to myself by having a dedicated Wintendo.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#178

Post by e12e »

muststopmyths wrote: post #111
tyingq wrote: post #3

No free lunch, of course. Faster file access with WSL2 (vs WSL1), if you stay in the Linux world. But if you point it at Windows files (/mnt/c, etc), it's pretty slow. WSL2 just moved the slowness from one side to the other. Accessing the Linux FS from Windows (\\wsl$\) is also slow. That said, I am a fan, and get a lot of use out of WSL1. Since I don't use the Windows interop much, WSL2 should be a performance win f…

I'm sure I'm missing something but I don't get this problem with filesystem access performance. It seems the obvious way to do this was to have SMB mounts on either side and optimize the hell out of the already existing SMB implementations on both OSes to get the performance close enough to disk. Maybe have a dedicated virtual network interface exposed only to the VMs and not to the LAN to avoid security issues. It p…

I'm not really using wsl in anger (work laptop runs Linux, with a win 10 vm in virtualbox for the occasional nearly windows program; mostly the odd proprietary vpn; Citrix and occasionally rdp - although remmina on Ubuntu 18.04 mostly works fine) - but I've toyed with the idea of testing smb/cifs and nfs both ways - to see if it isn't good enough for a git checkout the size of the Linux kernel (Ditto a build/compile of same - although I'd normally mount a ramdisk for that, if I really wanted to speed things along).

Both windows and Linux should be fine with home on cifs.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#179

Post by happypants23 »

alibert wrote: post #154

Just a reminder that enabling Hyper-V (needed for WSL2) will make your computer boot your current Windows install inside a VM too. This might makes a slight performance impact. And you might also encounter issues with Type 2 virtualization software such as VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation. (I will still stick to WSL 1 because of that).

Just a reminder that enabling Hyper-V (needed for WSL2) will make your computer boot your current Windows install inside a VM too. This might makes a slight performance impact.

That doesn't sound right. Hyper-V is a Type-1 hypervisor, so by definition the Windows installation would not be running in its own VM (for some definition of VM).

And its pretty much exactly the same for Qemu/KVM on Linux, where Intel VT-x or AMD SVM hardware extensions are used to implement Type-1 virtualisation.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#180

Post by rb12345 »

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.

CredentialGuard uses Hyper-V, so it could be that.
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