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Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux

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Re: Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux

#41

Post by smackeyacky »

vrganj wrote: post #5

Okay what is it with WSL naming, this always confuses me. Shouldn't it be Linux subsystem for Windows?

Other people already answered but windows was just another personality on the original idea that cutler had for WNT. It just took a while for it to get implemented as a linux

Re: Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux

#44

Post by dnnddidiej »

thijsvandien wrote: post #12
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #2

If I can get this to work (haven't tried yet) it directly solves a problem I have right now this week right here in 2026, 30 years after Windows 95 was even a thing. Yes, I have weird problems. I get to look after some very weird shit.

Tell us more!

Probably works for a bank.

Re: Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux

#45

Post by EvanAnderson »

rahen wrote: post #10

Before WSL, the best ways to run unmodified Linux binaries inside Windows were CoLinux and flinux. http://www.colinux.org/ https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux flinux essentially had the architecture of WSL1, while CoLinux was more like WSL2 with a Linux kernel side-loaded. Cygwin was technically the correct approach: native POSIX binaries on Windows rather than hacking in some foreign Linux plumbing. Since it was me…

On Windows NT building software from source under Interix[0] (nee OpenNT, later "Subsystem for Unix Applications") was pretty nice.

Interix was implemented as proper NT kernel "subsystem". It was just another build target for GNU automake, for example.

(Being that Interix was a real kernel subsystem I have this fever dream idea of a text-mode "distribution" of NT running w/o any Win32 subsystem.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix

Re: Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux

#46

Post by ethin »

radiator wrote: post #27
rahen wrote: post #10

Before WSL, the best ways to run unmodified Linux binaries inside Windows were CoLinux and flinux. http://www.colinux.org/ https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux flinux essentially had the architecture of WSL1, while CoLinux was more like WSL2 with a Linux kernel side-loaded. Cygwin was technically the correct approach: native POSIX binaries on Windows rather than hacking in some foreign Linux plumbing. Since it was me…

Nowadays MSYS2, which does depend on cygwin under the hood, offers such a package manager (pacman of Arch Linux) and it is quite a user friendly to run native POSIX binaries on Windows without a linux VM.

In my personal experience, Msys 2 would work great until it didn't. Unless this has changed, from what I remember, Msys2 compiled everything without PIC/PIE, and Windows does allow you to configure, system-wide, whether ASLR is used, and whether it's used "if supported" or always. If that setting is set to anything but off, Msys2 binaries will randomly crash with heap allocation errors, or they do on my system. It happened so much to me when I had actual coreutils installed that I switched to uutils-coreutils even though I knew that uutils-coreutils has some discrepancies/issues. Idk if they've fixed that bug or not; I did ask them once why they didn't just allow full ASLR and get on with things and they claimed that they needed to do non-ASLR compilations for docker.

Re: Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux

#50

Post by firesteelrain »

rahen wrote: post #10

Before WSL, the best ways to run unmodified Linux binaries inside Windows were CoLinux and flinux. http://www.colinux.org/ https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux flinux essentially had the architecture of WSL1, while CoLinux was more like WSL2 with a Linux kernel side-loaded. Cygwin was technically the correct approach: native POSIX binaries on Windows rather than hacking in some foreign Linux plumbing. Since it was me…

I thought WSL2 is functionally a virtual machine with deep host integration. That’s why you need HyperV.
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