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> WSL is nice, but it takes up a lot of RAM on my system. I prefer to use MSYS2. That's why you trash WSL2 and just stick with WSL1. I'm surprised they didn't

> WSL is nice, but it takes up a lot of RAM on my system. I prefer to use MSYS2. That's why you trash WSL2 and just stick with WSL1. I'm surprised they didn't mention it at all. Keep MSYS2 around for where WSL1 doesn't suffice, but that should be fairly infrequent.

nolok 3y ago
There is an issue between WSL/Hyper-V and the cache system on linux, WSL2 might LOOK like it needs 8GB but in reality if you check under it most of it is used by cache, if you lower the amount of ram dedicated it will do just fine. WSL1 was great and I loved it better on many aspect, until you needed to touch the filesystem.
baq 3y ago
WSL1 just doesn't work well enough. I'd never recommend WSL1 for anything. The extra nines in compatibility matter in development work if you have any dependencies in your projects. WSL2 is also pretty good at giving RAM back to the host Windows. I guess you're really running thin on resources if this doesn't do enough.
- dataflow 3y ago
  WSL1 isn't the alternative to WSL2, it's the alternative to MSYS2. Surely you don't get more 9's with MSYS2.
  - baq 3y ago
    Makes sense, though I’d consider neither for work nowadays. I have fond memories of using msys2 for gcc but I’ve never used it for more than that.
evook 3y ago
There is an experimental flag[0] in the .wslconfig which let's you set autoMemoryReclaim to gradual or dropcache. On my laptop I had good success with dropcache and on my countryside desktop with gradual. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#experimental-settings https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#exp...
- nikau 3y ago
  You can do this manually by doing echo 1 > /proc/dropcaches or something along those lines
underlines 3y ago
I can't say WSL2 eats host RAM or vRAM: I moved all my ML training and finetuning stuff (OSS LLMs, TTS, STT, Text2Img) to WSL2 and have only minimal overhead. A clean Win11 host eats away less than 2GB and I love how you can just use your cuda devices on WSL2, use something like micromamba and cmake your wheels while still being able to switch to Win tools whenever necessary. Idle Cuda devices use around 0.5GB vRAM. Especially the two new experimental features in the last update of WSL2 added a nice QoL improvements: - autoMemoryReclaim – Makes the WSL VM shrink in memory as you use it by reclaiming cached memory - Sparse VHD – Automatically shrinks the WSL virtual hard disk (VHD) as you use it
- eurekin 3y ago
  I'm using wsl2 and noticed general responsiveness drops way down during finetuning (comparing to any other heavy cpu+gpu usage natively) . How's that working in your setup?
butokai 3y ago
WSL1 was what made me stick to Windows at the time, when I had a new laptop and didn't want to mess much with it. WSL2 was what convinced me to switch back to Linux, since I felt that WSL1 was going to be abandoned. What is its current situation? Is it still maintained?
- w0m 3y ago
  WSL1 was kind of amazing, IIRC it attempted to map all unix calls to their windows equivalencies. But there were edge cases and bugs when it just had serious problems. WSL2 came in, and is basically a simple local container. it isn't a buggy mapping, it is Ubuntu (or whatever you want to run). Once i moved over; 99% of my (non time SKU related) quirks went away, and it's only vaguely heavier. Honestly, as a terminal-creature, I prefer WSL2 + Apt to OSX + Homebrew as my macs always tend to turn into a local package nightmare and I'd end up wasting a day/mo untangling. My WSL feels pristine still ~20mo later, and I know i could wipe and recreate it in ~30m if I needed to (but i haven't felt a need).
- dataflow 3y ago
  > What is its current situation? Is it still maintained? It still works for me on Windows 10. No idea what it'll be like beyond then.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  I've heard indirectly and off hand that some Microsoft PMs still regret calling it WSL1 and WSL2 instead of something like WSL-A and WSL-B. My understanding from documentation is that WSL1 is "feature complete" but not "maintenance ended": they think they hit a strong Pareto Principal 80/20 for features in WSL1 and realize it won't support everything but often supports "enough" and any further compatibility issues are out of scope both because the tail is extremely long and the risk/reward of time invested into long tail issues are rarely worth it. I don't think WSL1 will be "abandoned" any time soon, but the list of "Known Issues" will only continue to grow and a lot of people get pointed to WSL2 simply because the long-tail Kernel compatibility is hard to beat if you are directly running the Linux kernel. But the many tools that work brilliantly in WSL1 still work brilliantly in WSL1 and there are still benefits to its barer/stranger metal approach.
barfbagginus 3y ago
3 months ago I trashed windows and hopped over to Ubuntu Budgie for my CAD and Dev workstation running 16GB RAM, after 18 months of somewhat hating life in Win11+WSL2. This dropped my full crashe requiring reboot - from 5/week to less than 1/week. I'm much happier for general browsing and dev - both have much fewer spontaneous crashes with reboot, and enjoy lower chance of OOM crisis thanks to the lighter OS and WM. My windows requirement, Rhino 3D 7, runs in a Win11 VM with 5GB RAM and 25 GB of storage. The VM can crash violently without taking down my host OS, so CAD BSODs impact me like a regular app crash. The VM RAM use is a bit higher than WSL, requiring me to close the browser when I do CAD to reduce the risk of OOM. But in windows I often had to close WSL2 and the browser, for the same reason. OOM will still lead to a gut wrenching lockup that require a reboot with 30% likelihood. That's probably because I don't run swap, out of a possibly unwarranted worry about NVME wear. To improve this, I'm looking at 3 solutions: 1) 4 GB of swap might give me a gradual OOM failure mode with plenty of time to kill apps as things slow down. It might even lower NVME wear by letting the OS swap static memory pages for pages of heavily used disk write cache. 2) CGroups can kill the Browser and VM if the system is near OOM. This is my favorite solution, since it would be nice to have this OOM behavior even if I adopt solutions 1 and 3. 3) A cheap upgrade to 32GB RAM would fix the problem, and also double my memory bandwidth. I can probably live without this, though. TLDR; Even with ample room for improvement, my best "Windows + WSL2" experience comes from Linux + a Windows VM! The most mysterious crashes are so rare it's a little freaky, and the remaining crashes have clear solutions. I am happy!
- malfist 3y ago
  Are you worried about swap in the guest os? You can configure the swapiness of the OS, if you set it to 10 or something it will only swap when you're out of memory or when an application explicit says it wants swap memory (pretty rare). That can preserve your SSD and prevent your hard crashes.
- maxerickson 3y ago
  If you are worried about the swap eating the drive, why not put it on a dedicated disk and just let it? If you are doing anything vaguely interesting, the time you are spending is costing a lot more than the drive would.

nolok 3y ago

There is an issue between WSL/Hyper-V and the cache system on linux, WSL2 might LOOK like it needs 8GB but in reality if you check under it most of it is used by cache, if you lower the amount of ram dedicated it will do just fine. WSL1 was great and I loved it better on many aspect, until you needed to touch the filesystem.

baq 3y ago

WSL1 just doesn't work well enough. I'd never recommend WSL1 for anything. The extra nines in compatibility matter in development work if you have any dependencies in your projects. WSL2 is also pretty good at giving RAM back to the host Windows. I guess you're really running thin on resources if this doesn't do enough.

dataflow 3y ago
WSL1 isn't the alternative to WSL2, it's the alternative to MSYS2. Surely you don't get more 9's with MSYS2.
- baq 3y ago
  Makes sense, though I’d consider neither for work nowadays. I have fond memories of using msys2 for gcc but I’ve never used it for more than that.

evook 3y ago

There is an experimental flag[0] in the .wslconfig which let's you set autoMemoryReclaim to gradual or dropcache. On my laptop I had good success with dropcache and on my countryside desktop with gradual. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#experimental-settings https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#exp...

nikau 3y ago
You can do this manually by doing echo 1 > /proc/dropcaches or something along those lines

underlines 3y ago

I can't say WSL2 eats host RAM or vRAM: I moved all my ML training and finetuning stuff (OSS LLMs, TTS, STT, Text2Img) to WSL2 and have only minimal overhead. A clean Win11 host eats away less than 2GB and I love how you can just use your cuda devices on WSL2, use something like micromamba and cmake your wheels while still being able to switch to Win tools whenever necessary. Idle Cuda devices use around 0.5GB vRAM. Especially the two new experimental features in the last update of WSL2 added a nice QoL improvements: - autoMemoryReclaim – Makes the WSL VM shrink in memory as you use it by reclaiming cached memory - Sparse VHD – Automatically shrinks the WSL virtual hard disk (VHD) as you use it

eurekin 3y ago
I'm using wsl2 and noticed general responsiveness drops way down during finetuning (comparing to any other heavy cpu+gpu usage natively) . How's that working in your setup?

butokai 3y ago

WSL1 was what made me stick to Windows at the time, when I had a new laptop and didn't want to mess much with it. WSL2 was what convinced me to switch back to Linux, since I felt that WSL1 was going to be abandoned. What is its current situation? Is it still maintained?

w0m 3y ago
WSL1 was kind of amazing, IIRC it attempted to map all unix calls to their windows equivalencies. But there were edge cases and bugs when it just had serious problems. WSL2 came in, and is basically a simple local container. it isn't a buggy mapping, it is Ubuntu (or whatever you want to run). Once i moved over; 99% of my (non time SKU related) quirks went away, and it's only vaguely heavier. Honestly, as a terminal-creature, I prefer WSL2 + Apt to OSX + Homebrew as my macs always tend to turn into a local package nightmare and I'd end up wasting a day/mo untangling. My WSL feels pristine still ~20mo later, and I know i could wipe and recreate it in ~30m if I needed to (but i haven't felt a need).
dataflow 3y ago
> What is its current situation? Is it still maintained? It still works for me on Windows 10. No idea what it'll be like beyond then.
WorldMaker 3y ago
I've heard indirectly and off hand that some Microsoft PMs still regret calling it WSL1 and WSL2 instead of something like WSL-A and WSL-B. My understanding from documentation is that WSL1 is "feature complete" but not "maintenance ended": they think they hit a strong Pareto Principal 80/20 for features in WSL1 and realize it won't support everything but often supports "enough" and any further compatibility issues are out of scope both because the tail is extremely long and the risk/reward of time invested into long tail issues are rarely worth it. I don't think WSL1 will be "abandoned" any time soon, but the list of "Known Issues" will only continue to grow and a lot of people get pointed to WSL2 simply because the long-tail Kernel compatibility is hard to beat if you are directly running the Linux kernel. But the many tools that work brilliantly in WSL1 still work brilliantly in WSL1 and there are still benefits to its barer/stranger metal approach.

barfbagginus 3y ago

3 months ago I trashed windows and hopped over to Ubuntu Budgie for my CAD and Dev workstation running 16GB RAM, after 18 months of somewhat hating life in Win11+WSL2. This dropped my full crashe requiring reboot - from 5/week to less than 1/week. I'm much happier for general browsing and dev - both have much fewer spontaneous crashes with reboot, and enjoy lower chance of OOM crisis thanks to the lighter OS and WM. My windows requirement, Rhino 3D 7, runs in a Win11 VM with 5GB RAM and 25 GB of storage. The VM can crash violently without taking down my host OS, so CAD BSODs impact me like a regular app crash. The VM RAM use is a bit higher than WSL, requiring me to close the browser when I do CAD to reduce the risk of OOM. But in windows I often had to close WSL2 and the browser, for the same reason. OOM will still lead to a gut wrenching lockup that require a reboot with 30% likelihood. That's probably because I don't run swap, out of a possibly unwarranted worry about NVME wear. To improve this, I'm looking at 3 solutions: 1) 4 GB of swap might give me a gradual OOM failure mode with plenty of time to kill apps as things slow down. It might even lower NVME wear by letting the OS swap static memory pages for pages of heavily used disk write cache. 2) CGroups can kill the Browser and VM if the system is near OOM. This is my favorite solution, since it would be nice to have this OOM behavior even if I adopt solutions 1 and 3. 3) A cheap upgrade to 32GB RAM would fix the problem, and also double my memory bandwidth. I can probably live without this, though. TLDR; Even with ample room for improvement, my best "Windows + WSL2" experience comes from Linux + a Windows VM! The most mysterious crashes are so rare it's a little freaky, and the remaining crashes have clear solutions. I am happy!

malfist 3y ago
Are you worried about swap in the guest os? You can configure the swapiness of the OS, if you set it to 10 or something it will only swap when you're out of memory or when an application explicit says it wants swap memory (pretty rare). That can preserve your SSD and prevent your hard crashes.
maxerickson 3y ago
If you are worried about the swap eating the drive, why not put it on a dedicated disk and just let it? If you are doing anything vaguely interesting, the time you are spending is costing a lot more than the drive would.