4 ms·

One thing I’m interested in is the ultimate form of dual boot: that you can have a regular Linux distribution installed that you can boot directly, or you can r

One thing I’m interested in is the ultimate form of dual boot: that you can have a regular Linux distribution installed that you can boot directly, or you can run it inside Windows. Is this going to let that happen, or is this heading in that direction? (I understand that at this stage you can’t mount anything on the Windows installation disk, so I suppose that for now it’d need to be two physically distinct disks at the least.)

shaan7 5y ago
And I want to do the exact opposite - basically what VMWare is able to do with Bootcamp installations. Then I could run Linux as I usually do, but not have to maintain a VM for Windows development (MSVC etc). If you try running VirtualBox with raw disk mode and attempt to boot Windows, activation will complain. I guess VMWare has some sort of special access that it can convince Windows Activation that things are okay.
throwawayninja 5y ago
I absolutely love doing this, usually in the other direction: external USB3-or-better hard drive which can boot by itself or be loaded into QEMU on linux/window/macos. Excellent way to treat operating systems like browser tabs.
pletnes 5y ago
I did that about 10 years ago, with virtualbox and «raw disk image» or whatever the feature was called. One physical drive per OS. Worked great for me at the time. No idea if this still works. (Win7 and debian at the time)
- steerablesafe 5y ago
  I just recently used raw disk images with qemu on Debian to remotely install an other distribution on an other partition and then I rebooted into it.
- trissylegs 5y ago
  It works with Hyper-V if you have a whole separate disk for the VM. You can't pass just single partitions to the VM like you can with KVM on Linux.
pid-1 5y ago
I guess that's what MS is aiming for, although as someone who has been using WSL at $JOB for the past 3 years I think they still have many rough edges to work on.
pyentropy 5y ago
Should be enough from a FS perspective yes, although: (1) the WSL distros don't have systemd (2) they ship with a custom kernel that doesn't support custom kernel modules First point is trivial to fix but (2) may be painful. You could even share the desktop environment as WSLg uses X11/Wayland. edit: apparently compiling modules is (kinda) working with wsl2: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4425 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4425
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- evertheylen 5y ago
  I used to run systemd in WSL through https://github.com/arkane-systems/genie https://github.com/arkane-systems/genie and it worked pretty well. Not sure about modules but I found compiling my own kernel with some more features (ext4 encryption support) pretty easy. (That being said, I'm extremely happy to run Linux natively now and no longer use Windows anywhere)
- gpm 5y ago
  (2) shouldn't be that painful since Linux distributions are generally perfectly happy with you booting off of different kernels at random.
totony 5y ago
I did the reverse a while ago. I had a Windows dual boot that I could run inside a qemu vm. Was pretty useful but I ended up only using the vm so the dual boot wasn't necessary.
rashil2000 5y ago
You can install SystemD-enabled WSL instances with distrod[0], and they have future plans to allow dual-booted physical Linux distro on a separate disk to run as a WSL instance. [0]: https://github.com/nullpo-head/wsl-distrod https://github.com/nullpo-head/wsl-distrod
ghishadow 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(software) like this ?
qalmakka 5y ago
This is quite banal to achieve. Just put Linux on its own disk and create a Hyper-V VM with the physical disk attached. If the disk has its own ESP, is it that simple, just remember to use UUID everywhere and Linux will happily boot wherever you try booting it from. I've got an external SSD with ZFS + Archlinux that you can easily run via USB live or that it can be run as a VM via KVM/Hyper-V, and it runs flawlessly everywhere, with KDE Plasma, VS Code, Firefox, ... Performance is very good, thanks to Linux being way less I/O intensive than Windows, and USB 3.1 is actually faster than a SATA disk, so it doesn't suffer that much from booting from USB. I even had a Windows VM on that disk and it worked fine. Linux is way more flexible than Windows in this regard, you can install every single driver (i.e. both NVIDIA and Mesa at the same time) available and it will just load only the right one at the right time.
sixothree 5y ago
You can do this with Hyper-V _but_ the disk cannot be "online" under Windows. Also, both disks might need to have boot loaders on them.

shaan7 5y ago

And I want to do the exact opposite - basically what VMWare is able to do with Bootcamp installations. Then I could run Linux as I usually do, but not have to maintain a VM for Windows development (MSVC etc). If you try running VirtualBox with raw disk mode and attempt to boot Windows, activation will complain. I guess VMWare has some sort of special access that it can convince Windows Activation that things are okay.

throwawayninja 5y ago

I absolutely love doing this, usually in the other direction: external USB3-or-better hard drive which can boot by itself or be loaded into QEMU on linux/window/macos. Excellent way to treat operating systems like browser tabs.

pletnes 5y ago

I did that about 10 years ago, with virtualbox and «raw disk image» or whatever the feature was called. One physical drive per OS. Worked great for me at the time. No idea if this still works. (Win7 and debian at the time)

steerablesafe 5y ago
I just recently used raw disk images with qemu on Debian to remotely install an other distribution on an other partition and then I rebooted into it.
trissylegs 5y ago
It works with Hyper-V if you have a whole separate disk for the VM. You can't pass just single partitions to the VM like you can with KVM on Linux.

pid-1 5y ago

I guess that's what MS is aiming for, although as someone who has been using WSL at $JOB for the past 3 years I think they still have many rough edges to work on.

pyentropy 5y ago

Should be enough from a FS perspective yes, although: (1) the WSL distros don't have systemd (2) they ship with a custom kernel that doesn't support custom kernel modules First point is trivial to fix but (2) may be painful. You could even share the desktop environment as WSLg uses X11/Wayland. edit: apparently compiling modules is (kinda) working with wsl2: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4425 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4425

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
evertheylen 5y ago
I used to run systemd in WSL through https://github.com/arkane-systems/genie https://github.com/arkane-systems/genie and it worked pretty well. Not sure about modules but I found compiling my own kernel with some more features (ext4 encryption support) pretty easy. (That being said, I'm extremely happy to run Linux natively now and no longer use Windows anywhere)
gpm 5y ago
(2) shouldn't be that painful since Linux distributions are generally perfectly happy with you booting off of different kernels at random.

totony 5y ago

I did the reverse a while ago. I had a Windows dual boot that I could run inside a qemu vm. Was pretty useful but I ended up only using the vm so the dual boot wasn't necessary.

rashil2000 5y ago

You can install SystemD-enabled WSL instances with distrod[0], and they have future plans to allow dual-booted physical Linux distro on a separate disk to run as a WSL instance. [0]: https://github.com/nullpo-head/wsl-distrod https://github.com/nullpo-head/wsl-distrod

ghishadow 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(software) like this ?

qalmakka 5y ago

This is quite banal to achieve. Just put Linux on its own disk and create a Hyper-V VM with the physical disk attached. If the disk has its own ESP, is it that simple, just remember to use UUID everywhere and Linux will happily boot wherever you try booting it from. I've got an external SSD with ZFS + Archlinux that you can easily run via USB live or that it can be run as a VM via KVM/Hyper-V, and it runs flawlessly everywhere, with KDE Plasma, VS Code, Firefox, ... Performance is very good, thanks to Linux being way less I/O intensive than Windows, and USB 3.1 is actually faster than a SATA disk, so it doesn't suffer that much from booting from USB. I even had a Windows VM on that disk and it worked fine. Linux is way more flexible than Windows in this regard, you can install every single driver (i.e. both NVIDIA and Mesa at the same time) available and it will just load only the right one at the right time.

sixothree 5y ago

You can do this with Hyper-V _but_ the disk cannot be "online" under Windows. Also, both disks might need to have boot loaders on them.