Microsoft Promotes Windows Subsystem For Linux "WSL" To GA Status

[TNZfr]

* DOS is a kernel not a bootloader.

It´s a OS, a kernel + a set of utils (fdisk, del, copy, move, dir...) Disk Operating System

* Windows 3.x is a graphical application running on a DOS kernel.

Thats actually correct Windows 3.x is a GUI for DOS

* Linux is a kernel.

Correct.

* GNU/Linux is an OS.

You can say Linux(kernel)+GNU Utils make the basic of an OS like DOS.

What is percived as Linux are the distributions made up of hundreds of projects, but Linux is actually "the kernel"

And when WSL uses a modified downstream Linux kernel you run Linux problem solved

You're more precise than me, thanks !
(given the fanatics opposite, I was leaving from afar)

[Ironmask]

You're more precise than me, thanks !
(given the fanatics opposite, I was leaving from afar)

I find it funny how you're an even worse case given that you can't explain what makes an OS besides "it needs GRUB".
Why are you so insistent on enforcing your skewed idea of what an OS is when you don't even know what DOS does?

[TNZfr]

Just a simple question : did you run once Windows 3.x, install it, use it, develop on it ?
(virtualbox experiment is not a valid answer, copy/paste from wikipedia neither)

[erniv2]

Your understanding of computing is at the level of a cargo cultist.

DOS is a set of abstractions over the BIOS. It has no memory manager, no driver framework, it doesn't even control programs that run "on top of" it, it completely relinquishes control to the program, that uses DOS as a library. In fact, some programs didn't even use DOS after booting at all, they would completely wipe it from memory after loading. It's not an OS, it's not even a kernel. It's name is a misnomer, it's even less than a bootloader by modern standards. Even the UEFI firmware in your computer is leagues more advanced than DOS.

Windows 3.1 *is* an OS. It has a memory manager, it has control over the programs that run over it (even if only cooperatively), it has it's own API standard. It is by all intents and purposes an OS, it does everything DOS does not. Calling it a GUI is like calling a monitor a computer.

You don't even know what an OS is outside of what you've been told by misinformed people from the 90s who didn't even have an internet connection to use to look this stuff up. Do not talk about things you do not understand, unless you want to put a flag on top of Mount Stupid.

Actually i was there, and used it Dos had drivers for CD drives and alot of other stuff and it also had memorymanagment drivers, without himem.sys you couldnt even load windows 3.x.

Back in the day you had 640kb RAM surprise, ofc. a modern UEFI that reserves around 80MB of you ram just for SMM tasks is more modern omg.

There where things like Highram and EMS ram and all that funky stuff in DOS and DOS4GW if you had to many drivers in lowram you couldn´t even start a game because it needed atleast 512kb of the 640kb ram and you had to look for free ram somewhere else.

What you are talking about happend with windows 95 when they introduced a vmm and .vxd drivers and windows could switch up to protected mode itself and take control of hardware.

And comparing dos that had a memory footprint of like 20kb 30 years ago and a modern system is just a bad joke we have GB`s of ram now and every shit can be loaded and nobody gives a .... hey just loading 1 linux kernel module let it just be dunno vfat will allready use 15kb holy crap back in the day dos ran vfat and all the other stuff at the same size.

[ssokolow]

What you are talking about happend with windows 95 when they introduced a vmm and .vxd drivers and windows could switch up to protected mode itself and take control of hardware.

Windows 3.1x had a primitive form of that. That's what "386 Enhanced Mode" (which you couldn't turn off in 3.11 for Workgroups) and "32-bit Disk Access" were.

The Win16 API may have required every graphical app running in the same protected mode VM for backwards compatibility, but each MS-DOS window got its own protected mode VM and Windows 3.1x running in 386 Enhanced Mode did run a VMM.

There was a lot of stuff we associate with Windows 9x that got its start in more primitive and less broadly used forms in Windows 3.1x, such as the Registry. (Seriously. Try launching regedit in Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It began as a filetype associations database which got built out to serve more roles in later Windows releases as part of improving their IT deployment and management story.)

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

I find it half ironic Linux users don't understand the desktop market, although it's also half fitting given how Linux has never been successful in the desktop space to begin with, so that's a given.

For the record, Microsoft has already lost the desktop space. Only Microsoft knows this, nobody else. They know they've lost to Android and mobile phones, the only thing they have left are their two most profitable ventures: Cloud computing (Azure), their new biggest revenue stream, and data collection, their second biggest revenue stream. Desktop is an old market for them, one they have solid footing in, but one they are not fooling themselves into believing is sustainable. Windows has not been their primary market for a long time.

Believe it or not, Microsoft has always had a semi-altruistic outlook about developers. Microsoft has always been developer-first. This is to get more software for their platform so they get more customers. At times, this has been out of genuine altruism. At other times, it really was just a marketing strategy. But either way you flip it, they're developer first.
This is why WSL exists. Any other company (even Microsoft from the past) would have disregarded Linux as a waste of time. Microsoft (especially modern Microsoft led by Satya) knew that developers simply liked what Linux was. Not trying to sway Linux devs, not trying to encroach on it's market. Literally just letting developers use the tools they like instead of trying to blindly suppress or ignore it, so that developers wouldn't completely abandon their platform.

WSL is genuinely a case of MS just giving people what they want. If anything, it was probably spurred by Microsoft employees themselves (you do realize Microsoft is run by humans and it's not a robot empire? Maybe the higher-ups are pointy-headed bosses but it's still the hacker-run company it's always been), the same people who initiated VSCode and .NET's open source ventures. Microsoft likes to have all their ventures lead back to their monopoly, but ultimate, they have always been developer-first and they largely just make things developers want, it's up to you how invested you get.

typo: all their ventures lead back ... all their vultures lead back

[rclark]

...given how Linux has never been successful in the desktop space to begin with, so that's a given.

Successful here. Desktop, laptops, home server, SBCs ... Not a bare-metal Windows box in sight and not even a task that I wish I could do that Windows does. Loving it and have been for years. Installed on my dad's laptop and he likes it. Does everything he needs it to do. That is why I suppose I really don't understand the need for WSL(2) at all. But then, maybe M$ is simply 'migrating' to Linux in small steps . BTW, my 'PC' history began with DOS, CPM/86 back on a DEC Rainbow, through IBM PC clones with DOS, then all the Windows OSs, to present. Still use/program in Windows at work of course, but at home it is all Linux.

[dragorth]

Just a simple question : did you run once Windows 3.x, install it, use it, develop on it ?
(virtualbox experiment is not a valid answer, copy/paste from wikipedia neither)

I didn't develop on it, but I did run it in High School, as well as later Win95, Win98, WinME, Win2000, Mandriva Linux, Corel Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS 7, 8 and 9, OS X, Dos, BeOS and others.

Do you have any more questions about my credentials? Do I need to give you my geek card? Pictures of me splicing wires to get an over the air TV signal? Sing to you the modem sound that a 28.8kbps modem makes?

[evilhamsterman]

TNZfr you are confusing WSL1 and WSL2. WSL1 was a translation layer between Linux and Windows API calls. But the entire reason for WSL2 is it is a real Linux kernel. Just because there's no systemd (though that is also optionally available in version 1.0 ironically), the /boot folder is empty, and there is not bootloader like grub, systemd-boot, etc does not mean it isn't a Linux kernel. Distributions don't have to have those things, that's one of the nice things about Linux you can use any init system, bootloader, filesystem you like. Systemd is just one available init, Gentoo and Devuan don't use it as do many other distros. The reason you don't see any kernel files in the filesystem or a boot loader is because hyper-v boots the kernel directly. You can do the same thing with qemu, point it at a filesystem image, a kernel and possibly an initrd and it will happily boot it without there being a bootloader. The bootloader is necessary for initializing the hardware before handing off to the kernel, since a hypervisor has no real hardware it can handle that part and immediately hand off booting to the kernel without the need for a bootloader.

Another reason you know WSL2 is a VM running a kernel is you can't run VMware Workstation or VirtualBox if you have WSL2, that's because WSL2 is using hyper-v which has always prevented using other hypervisors because when you run hyper-v your desktop is actually a special VM also being run by hyper-v.

Finally Microsoft's own docs call out one of the advantages of WSL2 over WSL1 is "the use of an actual Linux kernel inside a managed VM, support for full system call compatibility, and performance across the Linux and Windows operating systems." https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...mpare-versions.

There kernel is tuned an modified for WSL, they don't need to support things like graphics cards, sound cards, NICs, etc because those are all emulated. They add in some of their own code to interface with WSL and there you go a customized Linux kernel, just like any other distribution. As has been pointed out here's the source code https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel, and here's the release notes https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...-release-notes. You can easily see a lot of Linux kernel code, here's the FS code https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Li...-wsl-5.15.y/fs you can see ext4, jfs, minix, even reiserfs since its an older LTS kernel, heck there's even the ntfs3 code in there https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Li....15.y/fs/ntfs3 which doesn't make sense if it was just another translation layer. Here's various arch code https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Li...sl-5.15.y/arch for mips, parisc, sparc. All thos files have Linux GPL2 blocks, and the git history includes this weird guy named torvalds

image.png

So shut up and listen, WSL2 uses a Linux kernel.

[mercster]

Microsoft has done a good job with WSL, happy to see more visibility and updates.