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Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

colinux.org

11–20 of 97 posts

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#12
post #8

I used this back in the Vista times and it worked very well. Very similar to how people use WSL these days.

WSL1 is actually quite similar afaik. Unfortunately also development stalled here in favour of WSL2. I remember Co-Linux to be a a thing around 2005, but it never stuck with me as I was mostly happy with Cygwin until all the libuv and go (now rust) stuff popped up.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#17
post #7

Reminds me of User Mode Linux, which AFAIK, runs only on Linux, maybe *nix.

UML runs only on Linux and only on x86, amd64 and powerpc. Which is a real shame, otherwise you could run a full Linux kernel on all these arm Android devices.

A shame, true, imagine having a whole Linux kernel as a macOS binary, running Linux containers with as little overhead as possible.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#18
I've been using this for years until early 2009, when I formatted my laptop with Ubuntu 8.04 and started running Windows in a VM. IE was still important back then and I needed to check web sites with it.

I was running Rails and other web frameworks inside colinux. I switched after I made sure that everything I was running in Windows for my work did run well in Linux. I remember that those very same programs run faster in Ubuntu than in Windows. The most notable improvement was GIMP's starting time: many times faster.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UML runs only on Linux and only on x86, amd64 and powerpc. Which is a real shame, otherwise you could run a full Linux kernel on all these arm Android devices.

A shame, true, imagine having a whole Linux kernel as a macOS binary, running Linux containers with as little overhead as possible.

UML and "as little overhead as possible" probably shouldn't appear in the same train of thought. I remember it from the very earliest Linux VPS providers, IIRC it only got semi-usable with some custom work (google "skas3 patch"), prior to which it depended on a single process calling ptrace() on all the usermode processes to implement the containerization. And there's another keyword that should never appear alongside low overhead in the same train of thought
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