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Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

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

#61

Post by herewulf »

nurumaik wrote: post #49
karlzt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The user friendliness of Linux combined with the stability of windows. I think you meant: "The user friendliness of Windows combined with the stability of Linux .".

My use case for WSL is really what original comment says: I need stability of windows so my graphics drivers won't stop working randomly and user friendliness of linux command line as a developer

My anecdatum: I once had a Windows machine that was frequently giving me the famous BSOD. Sometimes it would run for a few minutes, other times it would happen immediately on boot. Booting the same system in Linux would only produce some kernel errors, but the system kept running.

That's the kind of stability I need.

P.S.: Turns out the RAM was bad and replacing it fixed everything.

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

#62

Post by mayli »

umvi wrote: post #16

Wsl2 is a pretty excellent modern alternative imo. I was even able to get nvcc/cuda working in wsl

Yeah, except that requires the entire hyperv and constantly running into memory issues. Wsl1 on the other hand is way too slow on some use case. I stay with cygwin for common shell, wsl1 for simple linux user space tools, and ssh to a remote system if I need a real Linux.

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

#63

Post by card_zero »

pmontra wrote: post #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 faste…

> GIMP's starting time: many times faster

I think what you discovered is that GIMP is written primarily for Linux, rather than that Windows is shit. I mean Windows is shit, but that's coincidental. GIMP for Windows probably loads slowly because it "has to" load GTK and all its components like Cairo, but on Ubuntu these things were loaded already when the desktop started up.

I put "has to" in quotes, because it could have been rewritten to use Windows APIs, but that would be, you know, a rewrite. And GTK was made for GIMP. So like a lot of ported Linux programs it's basically going to bring half the Linux desktop with it so that the devs don't have to leave their comfort zone, and as a result it loads slowly. (And then the next one, Inkscape maybe, will also load slowly, since it loads its own versions of the same things.)

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

#64

Post by renewedrebecca »

selfhoster wrote: post #30

I think it's great that tools like colinux exist but when if ever will IT departments (System Administrators) figure out how to support Linux Desktop users on our machines instead of forcing Windows or Mac on us. Mac is a terrible OS for Java software development.

> Mac is a terrible OS for Java software development.

I've not seen this at all, and I use both Ubuntu and macOS for Java dev.

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

#65

Post by spwa4 »

itsmartapuntocm wrote: post #51
karlzt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The user friendliness of Linux combined with the stability of windows. I think you meant: "The user friendliness of Windows combined with the stability of Linux .".

Pretty sure it was tongue in cheek.

Not really. It really is a linux kernel that uses the ancient windows (pre-95, or pre-NT) technique of "cooperative" multitasking. It works on everything. It's super efficient. However, one process fails (or just slows down) or corrupts memory and it takes your entire system (in this case all other linux processes) down with it.

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

#66

Post by okanat »

venusenvy47 wrote: post #54
p_ing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think WSL1 development stalled in as much as Microsoft made the determination that it wasn't a viable path forward. I/O was piss slow and chasing syscalls NT API calls probably wasn't very fun. Microsoft already knew Hyper-V quite well so a VM made sense, they just had to put some automagic management around it.

Isn't WSL2 still slower than WSL1 for accessing Windows drives and networks? I use WSL1 because I don't have HyperV available on my work PC, but it's also convenient because I perform most of my work on Windows.

WSL2 uses a lower level, simpler API than HyperV which is a full-fledged hypervisor. That's why it is also available on Windows Home. If you can enable WSL1, you should also be able to use WSL2 unless the HW virtualization is completely blocked off. You need to run a command to change the default though.

WSL2 cross-OS I/O performance is lower than WSL1. Especially with the random access patterns and constant stat/access calls made by Linux-targetting programs. However that should be the rare option to take. Working on native ext4 FS of WSL2 is almost as fast as running native Linux. So you should really copy files in and work on them in WSL.

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

#67

Post by okanat »

herewulf wrote: post #61
nurumaik wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My use case for WSL is really what original comment says: I need stability of windows so my graphics drivers won't stop working randomly and user friendliness of linux command line as a developer

My anecdatum: I once had a Windows machine that was frequently giving me the famous BSOD. Sometimes it would run for a few minutes, other times it would happen immediately on boot. Booting the same system in Linux would only produce some kernel errors, but the system kept running. That's the kind of stability I need. P.S.: Turns out the RAM was bad and replacing it fixed everything.

So you were just lucky and Linux didn't happen to allocate system / driver critical memory to your specific RAM's broken side and this sheer luck gets it a praise.

I had the opposite. I got a Thinkpad with a broken RAM IC. Windows was booting and working 99% normally with the desktop apps. However running a browser caused it to completely freeze. Linux didn't even boot. It didn't move past the early stage. So it is Linux' fault now?

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

#68

Post by okanat »

mayli wrote: post #62
umvi wrote: post #16

Wsl2 is a pretty excellent modern alternative imo. I was even able to get nvcc/cuda working in wsl

Yeah, except that requires the entire hyperv and constantly running into memory issues. Wsl1 on the other hand is way too slow on some use case. I stay with cygwin for common shell, wsl1 for simple linux user space tools, and ssh to a remote system if I need a real Linux.

WSL2 has options now to reclaim unused memory and it has never required a full HyperV just a limited subset of it. That's how and why you can use it on Windows Home.
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