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Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

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Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#221

Post by 0dmethz »

I don't really understand this point of view.

WSL2 is faster and works better in almost every way. As a developer I absolutely love it and it has changed my workflow completely.

I haven't run into any limitations that kept me from doing what I wanted to do with it, and some minor adjustments like using wsl2host helps bridge any gaps.

What did we sacrifice along the way? Well, apparently we can't change our Windows network config or see Windows processes through Linux tools that weren't designed for it anyway.

And we want that sort of thing because, it's, uhh, "cool"? Those priorities don't make sense to me, but maybe I don't fully understand what people want to do with it.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#222

Post by saagarjha »

As someone who has done work on a sort of "Darwin subsystem for Linux", seeing the death of WSL1 has been really sad. Linux is one of the few OSes where this kind of approach really makes sense, since it's open source and has a small, very well-defined, stable ABI that you can implement and everything should "just work". Of course this process can be tedious and complicated, but I mean it is so much easier than what Wine or Darling is doing on a closed-source OS at a very different layer in the stack. It's of course obvious why WSL2 exists but its existence brings a great sadness, like Oracle buying Sun or Google killing off Hangouts and replacing it with whatever they're using these days.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#223

Post by for_xyz »

acqq wrote: post #207
for_xyz wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the correct answer. Myth that NTFS is slow should already go away. You can already run windows on top of BTRFS if you want but it'll be painfully slow compared to linux [1]. https://twitter.com/NTDEV_/status/1327358814891470850 https://github.com/maharmstone/quibble

Note: I've explicitly said: "NTFS on Windows" and "NTFS and the whole infrastructure connected to it". Also: "NTFS was slower than FAT" was true for years. I have no experience with BTRFS, but that doesn't prove anything without knowing more details (the overhead introduced to make it work). So... it's both NTFS and the Windows "subsystems."

> So... it's both NTFS and the Windows "subsystems."

Ok, probably both on default windows installation due legacy and backward compatibility with dos names [1].

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati...

I remember this issue when creating few million of files inside one folder and it was extremelly slow because of 8dot3 name creation. It has to go through each filename to generate short name O(n) when this legacy feature is enabled.

After disabling 8dot3 there were no performance issues anymore.

> I have no experience with BTRFS, but that doesn't prove anything without knowing more details (the overhead introduced to make it work)

I tried to point out following: Ext4, Btrfs, Zfs, any other UNIX filesystem will be slow under Windows. NTFS or any Windows first filesystem will be slow on Linux. There is just too much of the differences in OS architecture between the NT and Linux.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#224

Post by for_xyz »

eitland wrote: post #206
jmnicolas wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Care to explain why do you think NTFS is crap? I don't know if it's crap but it's much much slower than EXT4. I remember reading a comment here that Windows in a VM on a Linux host was faster than bare metal. Probably not true but I decided to make a test. I have a .net core app that insert data in a sqlite db (the resulting db is about 300 GB). So I benchmarked this app on Linux (it was previously running on Windo…

An interesting observation I did was that even Hello World is about 100x faster on Linux than on Windows. In my Linux VM I had to use the time command to even have an idea of how long it took, as it seemed to return immediately. I think 5-15ms but it already a while ago. On the Windows machine where the Linux VM ran it took several hundred ms.

Which VM software did you use under windows?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#225

Post by baq »

wnevets wrote: post #91

One of the things I really liked about WSL1 was the integration with Windows. This caused some bugs but made other task a lot simpler. For example editing a file that existed in the Windows file system with a Windows application and then actually processing it with a linux binary worked really well most of the time. With WSL2 you are expected to only interact with files in the linux filesystem with linux. I'm sure th…

re files - you can mount an nfs export in WSL and Windows 10 comes with a opt-in NFS server - or perhaps try samba.

re network - if you mean localhost, that's probably impossible due to WSL2 being a vm unless the folks at MS invent some deep black magic. you should be able to use the LAN interface IP address, though.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#226

Post by ChrisSD »

unnouinceput wrote: post #202

Quote:"...or, god forbid, suffer through the ancient CMD.EXE console". What's wrong with cmd.exe? It's a good tool Quote: "and the fact that WSL continues to be separate from the native Windows environment shows. Even though I was quite hopeful, I cannot use WSL as my daily driver because I need to interact with “native” Windows tooling." You do know CygWin exists, yes? Quite good and get this, exists from the moment…

This is the first time in a long time I've heard anyone refer to cmd as a "good tool". It's a legacy from DOS. Not in the literal sense of course but in the sense of the builtins, syntax and the horrendous BAT.

Mind you DOS had a lot of fans even in the late 90's/00's so of course it had its advocates. But they are much rarer nowadays.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential

#228

Post by shawnz »

peteri wrote: post #210
Macha wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker support is precisely the sort of feature that would have required significantly more work to support in WSL1 than WSL2.

Docker works fine with WSL1, I don't think I can use WSL2 at work as we're waiting on the next LTS version of Windows.

Docker can't be hosted on WSL1. You can use the Docker client on WSL1 to communicate with a Docker host running on WSL2 or Hyper-V, though (which is how Docker Desktop works)
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