I think you're mixing up WSL2 and x86 (is x64 out yet?) emulation for Surface (running on aarch64). WSL2 runs a full Linux kernel on top of the Windows kernel,

I think you're mixing up WSL2 and x86 (is x64 out yet?) emulation for Surface (running on aarch64). WSL2 runs a full Linux kernel on top of the Windows kernel, to be able to run Linux binaries with high compatibility (and good performance). x86 emulation translates a Windows x86 binary into a Windows aarch64 binary, so there is only the Windows kernel. Rosetta 2 works like this too. And so does box86/64. So x86 emulation, Rosetta 2, and box86/64 all use translated binaries and a single kernel. At least, that is my understanding. I defer to you on whether Rosetta 2 is translating libraries as well (as opposed to box86/64's approach which is to use some native libraries), I don't know.