5 ms·
WSL 1 and WSL 2 can coexist and be used according to what needs one's scenarios present. I imagine MS collected enough requirements to also justify a full Linux
by close04 6y ago
WSL 1 and WSL 2 can coexist and be used according to what needs one's scenarios present. I imagine MS collected enough requirements to also justify a full Linux VM. There will be some slowness somewhere, the 2 versions now let you choose on which side of the boundary to place it.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq
- mehrdadn 6y agoThey could've instead worked on speeding up the I/O subsystem and sped up Windows altogether. I refuse to believe it's impossible. The more plausible reasons to me seem to be (a) they have to work independently from the I/O subsystem team(s) for whatever reason (maybe they didn't care enough to cooperate), or (b) it's too tricky to get right and prone to bugs, so they preferred not to have to deal with it and risk breaking I/O.
- close04 6y agoI/O subsystem performance is just one aspect. WSL 1 is missing a lot of other stuff probably because the effort to implement it all was to great. MS would have to duplicate a lot of the effort already put in by Linux developers. So they went the route of a full Linux VM. And no matter how much MS improves WSL 1 there would always be something missing that enough users want/need. For example I care more about the network related stuff that wasn't implemented (NETLINK_ROUTE\RTM_GETROUTE, AF_PACKET family) because this excluded nmap.
- shawnz 6y agoWSL 2 can't coexist with other virtual machine software though (unless it leverages Hyper-V)
- sebazzz 6y agoGood chance that your other VM software can't co-exist anyway. Many other technologies, Windows Defender among others, leverage virtualization through Hyper-V.
- shawnz 6y agoHyper-V is not installed by default on Windows and I have not been required to install it for anything except WSL 2 (and Hyper-V itself). I think Docker on Windows also uses it but I don't use that. Windows Defender has never indicated a requirement for Hyper-V to me.
- mehrdadn 6y agoI think by Windows Defender they might've been thinking of the Sandbox?
- sebazzz 6y agoIt is not anywhere in the Windows features dialog mentioned explicitly but many features install an hypervisor under the covers. Not Hyper-V itself but a hypervisor which inhibits other VM hypervisors from functioning.
- shawnz 6y agoIf you are talking about "Windows Hypervisor Platform", that indeed has Hyper-V as a dependency.
- rb12345 6y agoCredentialGuard uses Hyper-V, so it could be that.
- blackoil 6y agoLatest version of VirtualBox and VMWare support Hyper-V and Docker latest/beta supports WSL2. That should solve most use cases.
- shawnz 6y agoI have had a number of problems trying to use the Hyper-V backend with VirtualBox. In my experience it has caused frequent crashing in my VMs which remains even after disabling Hyper-V.