Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WSL Manager

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: WSL Manager

#11

Post by behnamoh »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #7
behnamoh wrote: post #4

I wish it was a TUI. Windows is a plague I try to stay away from as much as possible, and it already gives me headaches to setup WSL and manage them over ssh. Some things you just can't do w/o remote desktop... And sometimes WSL crashes and there's literally no way to recover except to restart the whole machine. The only reason I use Windows is because Nvidia drivers are easier to setup. But once I'm inside my Fedora…

Are you sshing into the wsl instances or he windows host? Pretty much all my interactions with wsl is using the wsl cli. Other than the very initial step of enabling wsl, mostly because I never memorized the powershell enable command.

I ssh directly into WSL but for setting it up (auto-start, recovery, etc.) I ssh into PowerShell (which I hate). A TUI would go a long way there because no one wants to learn PowerShell.

Re: WSL Manager

#12

Post by osigurdson »

wongarsu wrote: post #2

The ability to run docker containers as wsl instances looks nifty. A bit more overhead since they now run as a VM instead of a container, but you get the ability to start a shell with Windows terminal or access files with Explorer (and thus every program running in Windows)

Perhaps I misunderstand your comment but when you run docker / podman in Windows, you are using WSL / HyperV.

Re: WSL Manager

#13

Post by skhameneh »

This is great and all... Except I’ve long given up on WSL. I really tried to make WSL work for many things, only to find the entire experience (reliability, performance, and beyond) was simply better in every way without Windows.

No matter what you do, there will always be some weird platform detection or line termination that pops up somewhere. And if it isn’t that, it’s degraded performance or kernel-level incompatibility.

Re: WSL Manager

#14

Post by smallerize »

osigurdson wrote: post #12
wongarsu wrote: post #2

The ability to run docker containers as wsl instances looks nifty. A bit more overhead since they now run as a VM instead of a container, but you get the ability to start a shell with Windows terminal or access files with Explorer (and thus every program running in Windows)

Perhaps I misunderstand your comment but when you run docker / podman in Windows, you are using WSL / HyperV.

The linked project includes a very different way to launch docker containers.

Re: WSL Manager

#15

Post by righthand »

skhameneh wrote: post #13

This is great and all... Except I’ve long given up on WSL. I really tried to make WSL work for many things, only to find the entire experience (reliability, performance, and beyond) was simply better in every way without Windows. No matter what you do, there will always be some weird platform detection or line termination that pops up somewhere. And if it isn’t that, it’s degraded performance or kernel-level incompat…

100% agree. If anything WSL is a Linux onboarding experience at best.

Re: WSL Manager

#16

Post by omnibrain »

skhameneh wrote: post #13

This is great and all... Except I’ve long given up on WSL. I really tried to make WSL work for many things, only to find the entire experience (reliability, performance, and beyond) was simply better in every way without Windows. No matter what you do, there will always be some weird platform detection or line termination that pops up somewhere. And if it isn’t that, it’s degraded performance or kernel-level incompat…

Yes, I since embraced pwsh for terminal stuff on Windows. For everything else I switched back to proper VMs or remote hosts.

Re: WSL Manager

#17

Post by okanat »

shmerl wrote: post #6

Is there anything that can run a normal Linux VM guest with good quality graphics acceleration on Windows host (i.e. both full OpenGL and Vulkan support)? Not the gimped half VM over HiperV. VirtualBox has really broken graphics support, you can only run software rendering Linux DEs that way.

WSL2 already allows you to use your own GPU driver as a paravirtualized GPU over open source Mesa d3d12 driver. You get quite good OpenGL performance with that.

There are projects like this https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV that you can use to setup a Hyper-V machine to use the same paravirtualization.

Re: WSL Manager

#18

Post by [deleted] »

okanat wrote: post #17
shmerl wrote: post #6

Is there anything that can run a normal Linux VM guest with good quality graphics acceleration on Windows host (i.e. both full OpenGL and Vulkan support)? Not the gimped half VM over HiperV. VirtualBox has really broken graphics support, you can only run software rendering Linux DEs that way.

WSL2 already allows you to use your own GPU driver as a paravirtualized GPU over open source Mesa d3d12 driver. You get quite good OpenGL performance with that. There are projects like this https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV that you can use to setup a Hyper-V machine to use the same paravirtualization.

[deleted]

Re: WSL Manager

#19

Post by shmerl »

okanat wrote: post #17
shmerl wrote: post #6

Is there anything that can run a normal Linux VM guest with good quality graphics acceleration on Windows host (i.e. both full OpenGL and Vulkan support)? Not the gimped half VM over HiperV. VirtualBox has really broken graphics support, you can only run software rendering Linux DEs that way.

WSL2 already allows you to use your own GPU driver as a paravirtualized GPU over open source Mesa d3d12 driver. You get quite good OpenGL performance with that. There are projects like this https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV that you can use to setup a Hyper-V machine to use the same paravirtualization.

> Tere are projects like this https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV that you can use to setup a Hyper-V machine to use the same paravirtualization.

> Automatically Installs Windows to the VM

This seems to be focused on Windows guests. I need this for Linux guests.

May be when Hyper-V will make this usable out of the box for any guests, I'll take a look. And if it's something shareable, may be VirtualBox should pick that up.

Re: WSL Manager

#20

Post by eddythompson80 »

behnamoh wrote: post #11
eddythompson80 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sshing into the wsl instances or he windows host? Pretty much all my interactions with wsl is using the wsl cli. Other than the very initial step of enabling wsl, mostly because I never memorized the powershell enable command.

I ssh directly into WSL but for setting it up (auto-start, recovery, etc.) I ssh into PowerShell (which I hate). A TUI would go a long way there because no one wants to learn PowerShell.

You can use wsl.exe from powershell to manage wsl.
Post reply on HN