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File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

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Re: File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#21

Post by comfydragon »

hermitdev wrote: post #7
revelation wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem to work with USB serial devices, but only because those drivers on windows in turn emulate a serial port. So we have the USB driver pretending to be a serial port to Windows pretending to be a TTY to the Linux subsystem. It's a bit silly, but then I imagine TTY is a whole lot easier to emulate (even with all the cruft on that) than a USB chipset.

Tangential, but there was a recent HN article (I think) (that for the life of me I cannot find a link to) that referenced a Microsoft DSL for describing finite state machines that was principally developed to implement MS's USB driver. Closest link I could find (which is not the correct one) is: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/model-based...

P? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12673739

(Only took me about twenty minutes of assorted searches to find it too...)

Re: File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#22

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

sengork wrote: post #14
ungzd wrote: post #3

Does it suffer from similar quirks as Cygwin (.exe suffix removal, symlinks, permissions mapping)? - https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html - https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#pathnames-symlin...

Cygwin (64bit) didn't work for me in the latest creators update (actually I think it broke even before that). Now I am trying things using WSL itself, so far it has been a productive move. File permissions and security descriptors proved to be quite a hassle when removing Cygwin requiring multiple takeown and cacls hacks to remove some of the files. On the flip side I saved some disk space too.

"WSL isn't done until Cygwin doesn't run"

Re: File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#23

Post by neves »

Last time I tried to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux it was a mess. I thought I could access my files from windows and messed all the filesystem.

Now it looks like I can freely exchange my files between the WSL and Windows. Is it true?

Do I finally have a linux inside a windows machine where I can install things using apt-get (instead of cygwin setup.exe)?

When will it goes into the official Windows 10 version?

Re: File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#24

Post by gravelc »

ajross wrote: post #8
revelation wrote: post #2

I wonder if they have plans to add other emulation features, most importantly the ability to passthrough USB devices (or even graphic cards?). I don't need or want the Linux graphical interface of my VM, it's pretty much redundant, but I do need to make devices available to the Linux software. Otherwise it's a bit like emulating a microcontroller - sure, Turing says the thing can compute everything, but in a very pra…

Seems like you might be better served with a linux desktop and windows in a VM then. The use case for WSL right now is someone like a web developer. They can develop and debug node apps locally in their native environment.

Works great for bioinformatics too. I've exited the Apple world (high prices etc.), and don't miss much now.

No longer have to modify Powershell to make it more Unix-like. Jupyter notebook works fine, so I'm happy. No more bother with dual booting either; Ubuntu is gone as well.

Re: File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#25

Post by eVeechu7 »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #19

Network filesystems! That's the last big feature I've been needing for regular use of WSL for light tasks. There's still enough weird behavior I wouldn't look at WSL as a complete Linux replacement, but it sure is a lot nicer than Cygwin/msys2. They don't say anything about FUSE, I wonder if this work is at all related?

I am pretty sure this update does not add FUSE support. FUSE would add the ability to use SSHFS, which is the network file system support I'm interested in.

If FUSE would be useful to you, please vote for it at https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/266908-command-prompt-con...

Re: File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#26

Post by p2t2p »

Java still doesn't work properly though =(. "mvn clean package" on one of corporate projects takes about 5 to 8 minutes in native java on Windows or Mac and it takes more than one hour in WSL. I had so much hope for WSL that I would finally have only ONE device (surface), but no, we're not there yet.

Re: File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#27

Post by Stubb »

neves wrote: post #23

Last time I tried to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux it was a mess. I thought I could access my files from windows and messed all the filesystem. Now it looks like I can freely exchange my files between the WSL and Windows. Is it true? Do I finally have a linux inside a windows machine where I can install things using apt-get (instead of cygwin setup.exe)? When will it goes into the official Windows 10 version?

Your Windows drives appear under /mnt/c, /mnt/d, etc. in WSL. So your Windows home directory is /mnt/c/Users/ffoobar.

You can easily read/write Windows files from Linux, but I don't think you can do the opposite. I've used git within WSL to drive a repo on my Windows drive.

WSL gives you full-blown Ubuntu 16.04 where you manage packages with apt-get. You have to look close to the bare metal to see differences. Until the creator's update, for example, ifconfig didn't work.

Earlier today, I compiled and ran some OpenMP-based code in WSL and it happily detected all the cores on my dev machine and kept them busy with worker threads. Pretty cool!

Re: File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#28

Post by Stubb »

gravelc wrote: post #24
ajross wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you might be better served with a linux desktop and windows in a VM then. The use case for WSL right now is someone like a web developer. They can develop and debug node apps locally in their native environment.

Works great for bioinformatics too. I've exited the Apple world (high prices etc.), and don't miss much now. No longer have to modify Powershell to make it more Unix-like. Jupyter notebook works fine, so I'm happy. No more bother with dual booting either; Ubuntu is gone as well.

It's funny how Windows 10 is rapidly becoming a better Unix than MacOS since everything that matters runs Linux.

Re: File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#29

Post by corysama »

jhgorrell wrote: post #18
corysama wrote: post #9

I haven't dug deep into it yet. But, I'll say that I've been having fun compiling (command line) Linux apps with Clang and visually debugging them with GDB all through the UI of VStudio Community Ed and without a VM. /shill mode Linux is not a target for the code I'm working on. But, I like to keep my code as cross-platform as possible. Between this setup and prototyping code on several compilers via goldbolt.org, st…

https://godbolt.org/ ? Goldbolt.org seems to be fax sw.

Yep. Typo.

Re: File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#30

Post by neves »

Stubb wrote: post #27
neves wrote: post #23

Last time I tried to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux it was a mess. I thought I could access my files from windows and messed all the filesystem. Now it looks like I can freely exchange my files between the WSL and Windows. Is it true? Do I finally have a linux inside a windows machine where I can install things using apt-get (instead of cygwin setup.exe)? When will it goes into the official Windows 10 version?

Your Windows drives appear under /mnt/c, /mnt/d, etc. in WSL. So your Windows home directory is /mnt/c/Users/ffoobar. You can easily read/write Windows files from Linux, but I don't think you can do the opposite. I've used git within WSL to drive a repo on my Windows drive. WSL gives you full-blown Ubuntu 16.04 where you manage packages with apt-get. You have to look close to the bare metal to see differences. Until…

I thought it would give me total interoperability. That I could edit an movie in a windows app, run it through ffmepg, and go back to editing.

Cygwin is still useful.

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