111–120 of 933 posts
So it's like Wine in reverse. Is it FOSS?
"Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux". (No, it's not open source at this time.)"
What could be good though is MS backing the Wine project. But I guess it goes too much against their lock-in DNA.
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I expect they implemented a subsystem for Linux at the syscall level - i.e. they implemented the Linux kernel's interface at the ABI level. No headers would need to intermingle with open source; compile on Linux, run on Windows.
I've read comments where people wrote that NT always had some kind of POSIX subsystem, and it has probably just now been completed and expanded. Can't find any substantial writings on this, but it seems likely.
This will have been quite a bit more work than just a POSIX layer, IMO; POSIX defines a bunch of low-level functions that lie just under the C runtime library, but Linux defines a bunch more that expect a certain view of the world - things like clone(2), which lets you selectively choose what the forked process gets to inherit. POSIX only specifies fork(2). Linux implements fork(2) in terms of clone(2). And POSIX defines the API at the level of C; this will have had to implement the Linux ABI, where it differs from Win64. A minor detail of a bunch of assembly stubs, but work nonetheless.
microsoft is leveraging FOSS Linux to get Mac users. I think it's a real smart move. The author points to using grep and Xargs and some other tools to quickly update a package. That's the key here. These bash/Linux utilities are productivy boosters for all the Linux and Mac/bsd people out there. I can't imagine living without them and they're necessary for any system I develop on (which is currently a Mac).
microsoft is leveraging FOSS Linux to get Mac users. I think it's a real smart move. The author points to using grep and Xargs and some other tools to quickly update a package. That's the key here. These bash/Linux utilities are productivy boosters for all the Linux and Mac/bsd people out there. I can't imagine living without them and they're necessary for any system I develop on (which is currently a Mac).
I agree. I'm (mostly) a Windows user, and the one reason I'm constantly thinking of moving to OSX as my primary OS is the amount of command-line tooling that is available in the system. Everything new is always there first. I've started feeling that I was holding back by staying on Windows, even if using Mingw daily. This might be the thing that saves Windows as a dev machine for me. I'm a heavy cmd/powershell user b…
Having had OS X, Windows, and various Linux distributions as my primary operating systems I would consider having an Arch Linux VM kicking around if you want all the packages in the world, maintained fairly well.
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Totally doable. Use KVM to virtualize Windows and (the important part) make sure your CPU and motherboard support VT-d. Then you can pass a graphics card (separate from the one you run Linux with, naturally) to the VM and get >95% of native performance. There's lots of videos of folks doing this.
I've heard that this works wonderfully for graphics, but the sound emulation is pretty terrible. At least, I've heard about clicks and pops when the game puts much load on the system. This was on a friend's machine; maybe he had it configured badly.
I wonder if they implemented a copy-on-write fork syscall in NT. Otherwise it will be slower (and use a lot more memory) in some scenarios. Edit: And cow fork only makes sense if there is memory over-commit. So to be fully featured it would need a separate memory subsystem with memory over-commit.
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Windows does have symlinks and hardlinks that work very similarly but are only exposed via a built in cmd command. That said no one uses them.
I use them. They're also heavily used by the OS itself -- the entire WinSxS folder structure is a whole lot of symlinks.