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Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

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Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#241

Post by agustif »

lrae wrote: post #21
agustif wrote: post #5

I've dedicated 2 solid work hours to help a co-worker migrate from wsl1 to wsl2. Such a PITA. I couldn't get the linux tab to appear on his explorer.exe like in mine but oh well everything else worked fine!

Wait, I didn't even know that was a thing. I am on WSL2 and don't have that either, nor do I think I ever saw it in Microsoft's docs. Interesting, thanks. Let's see if I get it to work for me. For now I always went with \\wsl$. Edit: Wait, are you on an insider build by chance? https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2020/04/08/announc... Seems like this isn't in yet otherwise.

Oh yeah, that was it indeed, I'm on insider build.

Didn't know it was bc of that!

Glad it discovered it for you, it's a great feature wsl$$ not so much clean as this.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#242

Post by uberman »

lostmsu wrote: post #240
uberman wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ssh into your remote and start a tmux session then. If you are disconnected you ssh back then tmux attach. :-)

Remote machine is Windows. tmux is not available on Windows. That's the whole issue. This could be done with WSL, but WSL is too heavy for a task like that.

Ah my apologies, I thought you were looking for a native windows client version of tmux to go along with the native client ssh. I see you are looking for a server side implementation though.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#243

Post by ncmncm »

dboreham wrote: post #166
ncmncm wrote: post #162

Can somebody explain why he doesn't get the best of all worlds just running Wine on bare-metal Linux? Sure, he's obliged to run those programs, but that's table stakes. Other than those , it's Linux from here to the bank, and those processes show up in ps output with right numbers even.

Because his job is to ship software that runs on Windows. You can only do that on actual Windows.

That is a manifestly false statement. E.g., the whole MSYS system is cross-compiled, and tested on Wine.

Of course, programs would still need QA on real windos, and OS bugs they tickled would not be reproduced. But running them in a VM, with the file system exposed via Samba, would tickle the OS-interaction bugs. Those runs wouldn't show up on ps.

True, mgmt might look at him funny. But in my experience they do anyway.

So, the question remains open.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#244

Post by kazinator »

> Can you imagine how cool it would be if you could type ps or top within a WSL session and see Linux and Windows processes side-by-side, able to mutate their state with kill

No, that could not reasonably have been. The underlying NT kernel seeing all processes, whether Win32 or WSL, is one thing, but the psutils in the Linux world being able to see non-Linux processes doesn't make any amount of sense.

kill works by sending signals. This makes no sense to processes that are not in the Linux domain.

Edit: also what ralph87 writes in paragraph 4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25154556

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#245

Post by userbinator »

spacenick88 wrote: post #208
userbinator wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux and Unix in general seems to love huge writeback caching, which is great for speed but horrible for consistency and reliability to power failure and such; on the other hand, Windows flushes the caches more often, providing greater reliability but without as much speed. That's been my experience, in any case; doing lots of small file operations barely causes any disk activity in Linux, but far more in Windows. M…

Linux/Unix just trust that if you want something persisted with certainty you'll do an fsync, if you do it will absolutely guarantee you're not losing that. It will absolutely make sure that your filesystem doesn't get corrupted by a power loss but if you didn't fsync your write you had no place believing it was persisted. Doing that IMHO matches real world use much better. If I do a compile and get a power outage I…

Doing that IMHO matches real world use much better. If I do a compile and get a power outage I don't care if some object files get lost.

The real world use is someone working on a document, using Save periodically, and expecting whatever was last saved to survive the next outage, not some arbitrarily old version.

In other words, Windows implicitly fsync's often.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#246

Post by johannes1234321 »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #133
johannes1234321 wrote: post #4

> And the reason I can imagine this is because macOS gives you this model (albeit cheating because macOS is essentially Unix). What is the cheat there? That MacOS X is a single operating system, where both, command line tools the blog author knows and GUI tools, life in the same world, with da process model and same devices on a single kernel, unlike WSL? How is that cheating? Is my Linux desktop cheating as well?

Well, cheating in that it’s a totally different system, which makes it not a good apples to apples comparison. MacOS is UNIX. Unix and Linux are similar in many ways and plenty of Linux utilities have been ported over or packaged for macOS, the same as any other BSD, but as you say, it’s one kernel and one system with different interface options. It’s not as if you’re having to deal with different file systems or sha…

Docker for Mac however is no Apple Product. Thus nothing Apple can be blamed or praised for (at the most as enabler)

And it doesn't fit the requirements they stated: The docker container can't see the host's processes nor can the host see the container's processes. So the suggested "cheat" isn't there either.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#247

Post by eitland »

for_xyz wrote: post #224
eitland wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting observation I did was that even Hello World is about 100x faster on Linux than on Windows. In my Linux VM I had to use the time command to even have an idea of how long it took, as it seemed to return immediately. I think 5-15ms but it already a while ago. On the Windows machine where the Linux VM ran it took several hundred ms.

Which VM software did you use under windows?

Probably VirtualBox, could have been Hyper-V.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#248

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #214
skissane wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OS/2 subsystem only ever emulated OS/2 1.x, it never emulated OS/2 2.x or later. That severely limited its usefulness. Also, it only supported text mode apps out of the box, and the GUI was only available from Microsoft as an add-on sold separately (which very few people bought) There was never a huge amount of OS/2 software anyway. And a lot of what software was available for OS/2, also had native Windows versio…

I only cared about Linux, because of the way Microsoft managed their POSIX support. From my point of view, Linux would never taken off if POSIX had been taken more seriously. I do disagree with the developer mindshare though, for me they are looking into the market for cloud, where yes UNIX was won, but there are plenty of scenarios out there where UNIX support is meaningless, desktop applications, mobile platforms,…

> "From my point of view, Linux would never taken off if POSIX had been taken more seriously."

Taking POSIX seriously would have made no sense at the time. Back then, Microsoft seemed in a position to supplant the '70s era UNIX architecture with a more up-to-date '90s era son-of-VMS architecture for servers. Nobody was expecting Linux to come out of the blue, brutally fratricide all the other UNIXes, and take over the server market.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#249

Post by phendrenad2 »

WSL1 was nice and idealistic, but WSL2 is a better fit for how people actually want to use WSL (IMHO): Linux as essentially a Windows app. You could get this before with VirtualBox or some other VM, but now it's more tightly integrated, with built-in filesystem sharing, and Linux distros distributed through the Windows Store.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#250

Post by mixmastamyk »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #248
pjmlp wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only cared about Linux, because of the way Microsoft managed their POSIX support. From my point of view, Linux would never taken off if POSIX had been taken more seriously. I do disagree with the developer mindshare though, for me they are looking into the market for cloud, where yes UNIX was won, but there are plenty of scenarios out there where UNIX support is meaningless, desktop applications, mobile platforms,…

> " From my point of view, Linux would never taken off if POSIX had been taken more seriously. " Taking POSIX seriously would have made no sense at the time. Back then, Microsoft seemed in a position to supplant the '70s era UNIX architecture with a more up-to-date '90s era son-of-VMS architecture for servers. Nobody was expecting Linux to come out of the blue, brutally fratricide all the other UNIXes, and take over…

Then the supercomputer, mobile, and embedded markets as well.
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