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How WSL2 Works
- wmf 8y agoNew technical details for the impatient: WSL 2 runs a very lightweight Hyper-V VM (the same type we use for Hyper-V isolated containers) with a full Linux kernel so there is no syscall translation occurring. The lightweight Hyper-V VM, the 9P filesystem bridge and even the kernel is heavily borrowed from the kernel we use with LCOW in Azure. these VMs use virtually allocated memory, start up in under a second and stop even faster the Linux filesystem is now just using EXT4 directly over a virtual pmem device sharing files/folders is fully maintained by use of a filesystem bridge using the 9P protocol, so WSL 2 sees all your Windows files and folders and you can see your Linux mounts from Windows there is now a NIC in WSL 2. We used our NAT network mode so that NIC is fully managed and coordinated by the host, but it does have its own IP
- ncmncm 8y agoThe key question is, why would you give Windows control over your computer? (It makes me queasy just thinking about it.) Instead, boot into something trustworthy, and run Windows bottled in a VM if you still need it. Windows actually runs faster in a VM than natively, because a host system can be overwhelmingly better at managing a file system than Windows is. The article suggests that Windows is better with big files, but the truth is that it is just better with them than with small files, not better than something else. Microsoft could make things better for users by enabling Windows to boot without the host being obliged to emulate real hardware. Maybe that comes with this new thing.