11–20 of 55 posts
I'm done with WSL. It just makes life too hard, dual disk is a problem, two network endpoints two firewalls, two different hypervisors you can choose from where some things expect one some the other. I used to think a windows laptop would be better for hardware management, maybe it is but I just gave up and installed Linux. My life is so much easier.
I think Optimize-VHD will do the same thing as messing with diskpart. It's a shame you can't just turn on live TRIM support. This kind of disk image is a bunch of multi-megabyte blocks of data, plus a list of where each block goes on the virtual disk. Implementations can support TRIM by deleting the block that's zeroed and moving the block at the end of the file into that spot. VirtualBox can do this, shrinking the f…
It seems like just using a sparse file would make things simpler. I guess there would be potential inefficiency when you try to move the VM to another drive, but for just storing and using the VM in place it doesn't seem like this has to be hard: a TRIM inside the VM gets translated into a hole punch in the disk image file, which gets translated into a TRIM sent to the underlying storage.
I think Optimize-VHD will do the same thing as messing with diskpart. It's a shame you can't just turn on live TRIM support. This kind of disk image is a bunch of multi-megabyte blocks of data, plus a list of where each block goes on the virtual disk. Implementations can support TRIM by deleting the block that's zeroed and moving the block at the end of the file into that spot. VirtualBox can do this, shrinking the f…
I'm done with WSL. It just makes life too hard, dual disk is a problem, two network endpoints two firewalls, two different hypervisors you can choose from where some things expect one some the other. I used to think a windows laptop would be better for hardware management, maybe it is but I just gave up and installed Linux. My life is so much easier.
WSL is really convenient for a lot of use cases though. Much better than dual booting on a machine used primarily for gaming.
My biggest frustration with WSL at present is that 1Password won’t properly support proxying their ssh agent into it. (Though in googling it again just now, I see a suggestion to try something called npiperelay, so I’ll spend some time seeing again if I can get that working)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like just using a sparse file would make things simpler. I guess there would be potential inefficiency when you try to move the VM to another drive, but for just storing and using the VM in place it doesn't seem like this has to be hard: a TRIM inside the VM gets translated into a hole punch in the disk image file, which gets translated into a TRIM sent to the underlying storage.
Sparse files would be useful but I'm pretty sure sparse files on NTFS always reserve their full size. Eating 1TB of free space for my ext4.vhdx is a non-starter.
If sparse files didn't save on actual space allocations, it would simply be a lie to call them sparse files. Granted, that's totally something Microsoft would do, and has done for other features they lack, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wish there was a good option in corporate environments where I can’t just install Linux.
At work I asked for a remote server and my pc is just a terminal to use ssh & xwindows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like just using a sparse file would make things simpler. I guess there would be potential inefficiency when you try to move the VM to another drive, but for just storing and using the VM in place it doesn't seem like this has to be hard: a TRIM inside the VM gets translated into a hole punch in the disk image file, which gets translated into a TRIM sent to the underlying storage.
Sparse files would be useful but I'm pretty sure sparse files on NTFS always reserve their full size. Eating 1TB of free space for my ext4.vhdx is a non-starter.
Nope, they don't eat up space. One of the fun side effects of sparse files on NTFS is calling WriteFile on the sparse file can lead to an ERROR_DISK_QUOTA_EXCEEDED error, which applications tend to not expect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
WSL is really convenient for a lot of use cases though. Much better than dual booting on a machine used primarily for gaming.
I’m also doing WSL-centric development and I’m not even really gaming on that machine, I just appreciate the comforts that come with competent multi monitor support and reliable wake from sleep. My biggest frustration with WSL at present is that 1Password won’t properly support proxying their ssh agent into it. (Though in googling it again just now, I see a suggestion to try something called npiperelay, so I’ll spend…
I'm done with WSL. It just makes life too hard, dual disk is a problem, two network endpoints two firewalls, two different hypervisors you can choose from where some things expect one some the other. I used to think a windows laptop would be better for hardware management, maybe it is but I just gave up and installed Linux. My life is so much easier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have something like that at work for testing Windows things, since my work machine is a Mac. It's pretty miserable in terms of latency and window management. If you can get this to work well with NX or X forwarding, that's cool, but it's a second class offering when that's your only option.
Hm, are you using native Windows RDP? That one has pretty low latency even in the default configuration (assuming a capable client).