14 ms·

Arch Linux adapted for Windows Subsystem for Linux

267 points by hunterwerlla 10y ago

mangix 10y ago
yay something that doesn't suck. hope it gets better.
Longhanks 10y ago
This pulls something from https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs - what's this URL? How can anyone tell this is related to Arch Linux? Why do the readmes link to 404s? All of this seems rather unfinished. Could have polished at least the github presence a little. Also, what are the advantages compared to solution like https://github.com/RoliSoft/WSL-Distribution-Switcher https://github.com/RoliSoft/WSL-Distribution-Switcher, which allows selecting different distributions, including Arch Linux?
- alphaneuron 10y ago
  Looks like heavy WIP (https://github.com/turbo/alwsl/issues/5 https://github.com/turbo/alwsl/issues/5). There isn't really anything on the main branch, indicating that it probably shouldn't be used(?) yet(?). Also, this seems to be the backstory: https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/8#issuecomment-244197316 https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/8#issuecom...
- ackalker 10y ago
  > ...which allows selecting different distributions, including Arch Linux? Sorry to rain on your parade, but there is _no_ official Arch Linux image on Docker[1], as you can easily verify[2]. Use at your own risk whatever Arch Linux image you happen to find on Docker Hub, such as this one[3]. It might work or it might break, but it ain't official. [1]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=214973 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=214973 [2]: https://hub.docker.com/explore/ https://hub.docker.com/explore/ [3]: https://hub.docker.com/r/base/archlinux/ https://hub.docker.com/r/base/archlinux/
  - colemickens 10y ago
    The attitude here is hard to understand. [3] is very clear about how it's built, no guess work involved.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  https://github.com/turbo/alwsl/blob/master/alwsl.bat#L307 https://github.com/turbo/alwsl/blob/master/alwsl.bat#L307 - it's a squashfs filesystem which is unpacked to replace the Ubuntu filesystem that WSL uses by default.
- antocv 10y ago
  Typical of windows ecosystem and developers to sow confusion and infringe upon trademarks. Windows/Microsoft - where "X actually means Y" and always changes meaning, never for the freedom of the user, always to maintain tight control and power over computing.
- opello 10y ago
  I was curious how the squashfs was generated too but didn't find anything describing it.
sidegrid 10y ago
Care to explain what this is? FAQ = 404
- romanovcode 10y ago
  Native linux subsystem for windows can run Ubuntu no problem. This "tool" gives you the option to run Arch instead of Ubuntu.
  - JdeBP 10y ago
    Others have already run Fedora. * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38802362/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38802362/
  - sidegrid 10y ago
    Thank you.
kozikow 10y ago
I am currently dual booting between Arch Linux and Windows 10. Moving to something like this one day makes me conflicted. On one hand I feel like I would betray open source, on the other hand I wouldn't have to restart my machine to play games...
- Longhanks 10y ago
  If your hardware supports it, you may be able to pull a 180 and run a Windows VM on the bare metal using hardware passthrough. There's a great community here: https://www.reddit.com/r/vfio https://www.reddit.com/r/vfio
  - Kenji 10y ago
    Wow, that works? Video games are pretty much the last thing that holds me on Windows. Everything else is solved on Linux. I am very interested in any solution for this problem.
    - chrisper 10y ago
      It works, but it requires some time investment. Not everyone has the same quirks, so you will have to play around a lot and try to find the cause of different issues. Totally worth it imho. It allowed me to go Full Linux
    - gcb0 10y ago
      same. is this a selective process? i mean, can I allow access to my video card and but still not to the rest of the CPU/memory/storage?
      - wtallis 10y ago
        Yes. Most Intel CPUs from the past decade have supported hardware virtualization extensions (VT-x) that allow for efficient virtual machines, where the host system allocates CPU time and memory much as it would for an ordinary userspace process. Select Intel CPUs also support an IOMMU extension (VT-d) that allows PCIe devices to be virtually isolated from the host system; effectively, the device's DMA goes in to the VM's memory space instead of the host system's memory space. This can be done on a per-device granularity. It allows the OS in the VM to access the device exactly the same way it would if the OS were running on bare metal, so no driver changes are necessary. Storage for VMs is still primarily emulated rather than virtualized, but you can use VT-d to grant a VM exclusive access to a HBA or RAID card or NVMe SSD, because VT-d works for any type of PCIe device.
yellow_postit 10y ago
The FAQ link is broken on the page, any ELI5 on what this brings beyond using Arch's package manager and the general goodness of choice? Both of which are awesome in and of themselves, just wasn't sure if there's more here before I jump in.
- alphaneuron 10y ago
  From what I can gather from the BOW discussion (see my link below), it's a kind of custom arch distro (https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs). AFAIK WSL is just a rootfs extracted by the lxrun cmdlet. So I guess this replaces Microsoft's rootfs with arch. It seems to be modified to work around some issues in WSL.
fungi 10y ago
http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/ http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/
fungi 10y ago
http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/ http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/
rl3 10y ago
I really hope Microsoft continues development on WSL until it's production-ready. Right now both piping and filesystem interop need a lot of work.
shmerl 10y ago
WSL is useful for some, but personally I'm more interested in reverse (Wine), mostly for some games without native Linux releases.
- Relys 10y ago
  I setup PCI passthrough in a virtual machine awhile back on Arch and it worked excellent! https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/3lno0t/gpu_passthrough_revisited_an_updated_guide_on_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/3lno0t/gpu_pa... The only issue I had was with my Oculus Rift, but I suspect I could have fixed it by getting a dedicated USB PCI card to passthrough. Anyways, for AAA games it worked wonderfully with very near native speeds.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    Well, I'm simply not interested in using Windows for that, so for me it's either native, Wine or bust. Lot's of games work in Wine very well already. So far the main missing piece is DX11 support which they are gradually chiseling now. When something like Witcher 3 will start working in Wine, things will improve.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  I was so excited when Linux versions started showing up on Steam. It meant I very rarely needed to reboot into Windows. But, I've tinkered recently with Windows 10 and WSL, and it's actually really neat. They've done a remarkable job making it work like a real Linux system in a lot of regards; my projects kinda bump up against the limitations of that (as they are administrative tools and perform actions as root and such), and so I can see areas where it's still incomplete, but I'm honestly shocked at how well it all works.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    What kind scenarios do you find it useful in? I.e. when would you use it instead of native Linux for the same purpose?
0x0 10y ago
What's that certutil and public key thing at the bottom of the .bat?
- alphaneuron 10y ago
  Was curious, too. It's the archlinux icon/shortcut encoded as base64. (it's a common trick to store binary data in a batchfile)
- est 10y ago
  Looks like a handy tool to output binary in a .bat script
supernintendo 10y ago
Maybe I'm in the minority but I prefer keeping my GNU/Linux and Windows installations separate, with each OS on its own drive. My Linux setup is secure, free of proprietary software and under my full control. When I run tcpdump, I'm met with a clean log where every packet is one I recognize. I get to use my favorite window manager (awesomewm) and I don't have to worry about forced updates. My Windows install is quite a different beast - automatic updates, mostly proprietary software and no major customizations other than performance tweaks and what the OS allows. I use it for gaming and media, and it works great. Boot times are very short with SSDs so restarting is not a problem. No compatibility issues, no fussing about with drivers and no need for translation layers like the Windows Subsystem or WINE; just two independent OSs that never let me down. That said, no hate toward this project. Arch Linux is probably my favorite distro (although I'm on Xubuntu at the moment).
- jcrites 10y ago
  It would be nice to be able to develop "native" Linux software right from within Windows where I'm doing other things. I can see the appeal. That's why Microsoft built the Linux subsystem, I suppose.
  - lugg 10y ago
    Embrace, extend, extinguish. Although I'm guessing a few devs are in the boat with "all company PCs must be windows." Gives them an out no?
    - sremani 10y ago
      No this is not that. The idea is some frameworks/platforms have become nix first, ex. Ruby, Python to an extent Java etc. OCaml to only name some. Windows Subsytem for Linux is about bringing these nix first developer plats to Windows and help developers like me to remain on Windows.
      - pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
        ummmmm.... that is the "embrace" part. you're all idiots.
ladzoppelin 10y ago
WSL is really amazing, I hope they keep going. The devs have done a really good job and seem to be very open to suggestions.
- 2bitencryption 10y ago
  The best software is always made by happy developers making software to make other developers happy. This also applies to Visual Studio Code.
  - herbst 10y ago
    Atom really is a nice piece of software, definitly done by happy devs. Havent tried to microsoft fork you mention yet.
    - contextfree 10y ago
      VSCode isn't based on Atom in any way except being built on Electron.
partycoder 10y ago
Interesting to see a Windows Subsystem for what they once called cancer.
sha666sum 10y ago
The screenshot on the github page shows running _yaourt_ as _root_. I can't see how doing it on Windows makes it less horrifying than on Arch.
- JdeBP 10y ago
  No, it doesn't. * http://askubuntu.com/questions/754942/ http://askubuntu.com/questions/754942/
teekert 10y ago
Main advantage I see above Ubuntu would be the Arch User Repo (AUR) which contains almost all software you can think of. Although that can change when Snap picks up speed. Snapd is also available under Arch though. Moreover, Arch will be much more current in general.
- alfalfasprout 10y ago
  aur is amazing. For a desktop distro, it's what makes Arch one of the best choices IMO. Want <insert package>? You can compile from source and get something your package manager can track. Not to mention never needing to reinstall for a new version. I love RHEL/CentOS dearly for servers, but needing to write a complex spec file and deal with the rpmbuild system just to get an RPM for a library is a pain. You end up with /usr/local full of stuff that's hard to update.
jlebrech 10y ago
would this allow for a SteamOS with all windows games support?
- throwaway7767 10y ago
  No. The linux subsystem cannot call windows programs and windows programs can't call linux programs. It's entirely seperated in that way. WSL looks like a nice replacement for cygwin, but that's about it for me.
jinmingjian 10y ago
Ubuntu is crying^_^
angvp 10y ago
Good job man, despite all the hate from linux users to windows, truth to be told, this might be helpful instead of running arch on a vm..
prirun 10y ago
If WSL were truly Linux compatible, then why would anyone need to adapt Linux software to run under it? This is the first step: embrace. The next step: extend. Apparently it's already happening, as people scurry to adapt shit so that it works with WSL. Next you'll have companies requesting that all Linux software be "adapted" to work under WSL, and if it isn't, they won't buy it. Once this happens, Microsoft can proceed to step 3: Extinguish. How? Easy - by adding incompatible shit to WSL. If companies succeed in forcing Linux software vendors to provide a WSL-specific version, they will have to be compatible with these WSL extension. Voila - now they are supporting a new Microsoft platform that Microsoft controls. Back before many of you were born, Microsoft killed entire product categories and companies by providing free versions of Office when it was first introduced, and making it compatible with competitors' file formats. Is it free now? Hell no, it's their main source of revenue! Can they repeat the same hat trick with Linux? Who knows, but they damn sure are gonna try. Anyone who thinks "Microsoft loves Linux" needs to take a history lesson. The only Linux Microsoft would love would have a dead penguin for a logo.

267 points by hunterwerlla 10y ago

yay something that doesn't suck. hope it gets better.

This pulls something from https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs - what's this URL? How can anyone tell this is related to Arch Linux? Why do the readmes link to 404s? All of this seems rather unfinished. Could have polished at least the github presence a little. Also, what are the advantages compared to solution like https://github.com/RoliSoft/WSL-Distribution-Switcher https://github.com/RoliSoft/WSL-Distribution-Switcher, which allows selecting different distributions, including Arch Linux?

alphaneuron 10y ago
Looks like heavy WIP (https://github.com/turbo/alwsl/issues/5 https://github.com/turbo/alwsl/issues/5). There isn't really anything on the main branch, indicating that it probably shouldn't be used(?) yet(?). Also, this seems to be the backstory: https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/8#issuecomment-244197316 https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/8#issuecom...
ackalker 10y ago
> ...which allows selecting different distributions, including Arch Linux? Sorry to rain on your parade, but there is _no_ official Arch Linux image on Docker[1], as you can easily verify[2]. Use at your own risk whatever Arch Linux image you happen to find on Docker Hub, such as this one[3]. It might work or it might break, but it ain't official. [1]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=214973 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=214973 [2]: https://hub.docker.com/explore/ https://hub.docker.com/explore/ [3]: https://hub.docker.com/r/base/archlinux/ https://hub.docker.com/r/base/archlinux/
- colemickens 10y ago
  The attitude here is hard to understand. [3] is very clear about how it's built, no guess work involved.
voltagex_ 10y ago
https://github.com/turbo/alwsl/blob/master/alwsl.bat#L307 https://github.com/turbo/alwsl/blob/master/alwsl.bat#L307 - it's a squashfs filesystem which is unpacked to replace the Ubuntu filesystem that WSL uses by default.
antocv 10y ago
Typical of windows ecosystem and developers to sow confusion and infringe upon trademarks. Windows/Microsoft - where "X actually means Y" and always changes meaning, never for the freedom of the user, always to maintain tight control and power over computing.
opello 10y ago
I was curious how the squashfs was generated too but didn't find anything describing it.

sidegrid 10y ago

Care to explain what this is? FAQ = 404

romanovcode 10y ago
Native linux subsystem for windows can run Ubuntu no problem. This "tool" gives you the option to run Arch instead of Ubuntu.
- JdeBP 10y ago
  Others have already run Fedora. * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38802362/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38802362/
- sidegrid 10y ago
  Thank you.

kozikow 10y ago

I am currently dual booting between Arch Linux and Windows 10. Moving to something like this one day makes me conflicted. On one hand I feel like I would betray open source, on the other hand I wouldn't have to restart my machine to play games...

Longhanks 10y ago
If your hardware supports it, you may be able to pull a 180 and run a Windows VM on the bare metal using hardware passthrough. There's a great community here: https://www.reddit.com/r/vfio https://www.reddit.com/r/vfio
- Kenji 10y ago
  Wow, that works? Video games are pretty much the last thing that holds me on Windows. Everything else is solved on Linux. I am very interested in any solution for this problem.
  - chrisper 10y ago
    It works, but it requires some time investment. Not everyone has the same quirks, so you will have to play around a lot and try to find the cause of different issues. Totally worth it imho. It allowed me to go Full Linux
  - gcb0 10y ago
    same. is this a selective process? i mean, can I allow access to my video card and but still not to the rest of the CPU/memory/storage?
    - wtallis 10y ago
      Yes. Most Intel CPUs from the past decade have supported hardware virtualization extensions (VT-x) that allow for efficient virtual machines, where the host system allocates CPU time and memory much as it would for an ordinary userspace process. Select Intel CPUs also support an IOMMU extension (VT-d) that allows PCIe devices to be virtually isolated from the host system; effectively, the device's DMA goes in to the VM's memory space instead of the host system's memory space. This can be done on a per-device granularity. It allows the OS in the VM to access the device exactly the same way it would if the OS were running on bare metal, so no driver changes are necessary. Storage for VMs is still primarily emulated rather than virtualized, but you can use VT-d to grant a VM exclusive access to a HBA or RAID card or NVMe SSD, because VT-d works for any type of PCIe device.

yellow_postit 10y ago

The FAQ link is broken on the page, any ELI5 on what this brings beyond using Arch's package manager and the general goodness of choice? Both of which are awesome in and of themselves, just wasn't sure if there's more here before I jump in.

alphaneuron 10y ago
From what I can gather from the BOW discussion (see my link below), it's a kind of custom arch distro (https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs). AFAIK WSL is just a rootfs extracted by the lxrun cmdlet. So I guess this replaces Microsoft's rootfs with arch. It seems to be modified to work around some issues in WSL.

fungi 10y ago

http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/ http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/

fungi 10y ago

http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/ http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/

rl3 10y ago

I really hope Microsoft continues development on WSL until it's production-ready. Right now both piping and filesystem interop need a lot of work.

shmerl 10y ago

WSL is useful for some, but personally I'm more interested in reverse (Wine), mostly for some games without native Linux releases.

Relys 10y ago
I setup PCI passthrough in a virtual machine awhile back on Arch and it worked excellent! https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/3lno0t/gpu_passthrough_revisited_an_updated_guide_on_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/3lno0t/gpu_pa... The only issue I had was with my Oculus Rift, but I suspect I could have fixed it by getting a dedicated USB PCI card to passthrough. Anyways, for AAA games it worked wonderfully with very near native speeds.
- shmerl 10y ago
  Well, I'm simply not interested in using Windows for that, so for me it's either native, Wine or bust. Lot's of games work in Wine very well already. So far the main missing piece is DX11 support which they are gradually chiseling now. When something like Witcher 3 will start working in Wine, things will improve.
SwellJoe 10y ago
I was so excited when Linux versions started showing up on Steam. It meant I very rarely needed to reboot into Windows. But, I've tinkered recently with Windows 10 and WSL, and it's actually really neat. They've done a remarkable job making it work like a real Linux system in a lot of regards; my projects kinda bump up against the limitations of that (as they are administrative tools and perform actions as root and such), and so I can see areas where it's still incomplete, but I'm honestly shocked at how well it all works.
- shmerl 10y ago
  What kind scenarios do you find it useful in? I.e. when would you use it instead of native Linux for the same purpose?

0x0 10y ago

What's that certutil and public key thing at the bottom of the .bat?

alphaneuron 10y ago
Was curious, too. It's the archlinux icon/shortcut encoded as base64. (it's a common trick to store binary data in a batchfile)
est 10y ago
Looks like a handy tool to output binary in a .bat script

supernintendo 10y ago

Maybe I'm in the minority but I prefer keeping my GNU/Linux and Windows installations separate, with each OS on its own drive. My Linux setup is secure, free of proprietary software and under my full control. When I run tcpdump, I'm met with a clean log where every packet is one I recognize. I get to use my favorite window manager (awesomewm) and I don't have to worry about forced updates. My Windows install is quite a different beast - automatic updates, mostly proprietary software and no major customizations other than performance tweaks and what the OS allows. I use it for gaming and media, and it works great. Boot times are very short with SSDs so restarting is not a problem. No compatibility issues, no fussing about with drivers and no need for translation layers like the Windows Subsystem or WINE; just two independent OSs that never let me down. That said, no hate toward this project. Arch Linux is probably my favorite distro (although I'm on Xubuntu at the moment).

jcrites 10y ago
It would be nice to be able to develop "native" Linux software right from within Windows where I'm doing other things. I can see the appeal. That's why Microsoft built the Linux subsystem, I suppose.
- lugg 10y ago
  Embrace, extend, extinguish. Although I'm guessing a few devs are in the boat with "all company PCs must be windows." Gives them an out no?
  - sremani 10y ago
    No this is not that. The idea is some frameworks/platforms have become nix first, ex. Ruby, Python to an extent Java etc. OCaml to only name some. Windows Subsytem for Linux is about bringing these nix first developer plats to Windows and help developers like me to remain on Windows.
    - pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
      ummmmm.... that is the "embrace" part. you're all idiots.

ladzoppelin 10y ago

WSL is really amazing, I hope they keep going. The devs have done a really good job and seem to be very open to suggestions.

2bitencryption 10y ago
The best software is always made by happy developers making software to make other developers happy. This also applies to Visual Studio Code.
- herbst 10y ago
  Atom really is a nice piece of software, definitly done by happy devs. Havent tried to microsoft fork you mention yet.
  - contextfree 10y ago
    VSCode isn't based on Atom in any way except being built on Electron.

partycoder 10y ago

Interesting to see a Windows Subsystem for what they once called cancer.

sha666sum 10y ago

The screenshot on the github page shows running _yaourt_ as _root_. I can't see how doing it on Windows makes it less horrifying than on Arch.

JdeBP 10y ago
No, it doesn't. * http://askubuntu.com/questions/754942/ http://askubuntu.com/questions/754942/

teekert 10y ago

Main advantage I see above Ubuntu would be the Arch User Repo (AUR) which contains almost all software you can think of. Although that can change when Snap picks up speed. Snapd is also available under Arch though. Moreover, Arch will be much more current in general.

alfalfasprout 10y ago
aur is amazing. For a desktop distro, it's what makes Arch one of the best choices IMO. Want <insert package>? You can compile from source and get something your package manager can track. Not to mention never needing to reinstall for a new version. I love RHEL/CentOS dearly for servers, but needing to write a complex spec file and deal with the rpmbuild system just to get an RPM for a library is a pain. You end up with /usr/local full of stuff that's hard to update.

jlebrech 10y ago

would this allow for a SteamOS with all windows games support?

throwaway7767 10y ago
No. The linux subsystem cannot call windows programs and windows programs can't call linux programs. It's entirely seperated in that way. WSL looks like a nice replacement for cygwin, but that's about it for me.

jinmingjian 10y ago

Ubuntu is crying^_^

angvp 10y ago

Good job man, despite all the hate from linux users to windows, truth to be told, this might be helpful instead of running arch on a vm..

prirun 10y ago

If WSL were truly Linux compatible, then why would anyone need to adapt Linux software to run under it? This is the first step: embrace. The next step: extend. Apparently it's already happening, as people scurry to adapt shit so that it works with WSL. Next you'll have companies requesting that all Linux software be "adapted" to work under WSL, and if it isn't, they won't buy it. Once this happens, Microsoft can proceed to step 3: Extinguish. How? Easy - by adding incompatible shit to WSL. If companies succeed in forcing Linux software vendors to provide a WSL-specific version, they will have to be compatible with these WSL extension. Voila - now they are supporting a new Microsoft platform that Microsoft controls. Back before many of you were born, Microsoft killed entire product categories and companies by providing free versions of Office when it was first introduced, and making it compatible with competitors' file formats. Is it free now? Hell no, it's their main source of revenue! Can they repeat the same hat trick with Linux? Who knows, but they damn sure are gonna try. Anyone who thinks "Microsoft loves Linux" needs to take a history lesson. The only Linux Microsoft would love would have a dead penguin for a logo.