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

[Volta]

Meanwhile:

The Microsoft RNDIS protocol is, as designed, insecure and vulnerable on any system that uses it with untrusted hosts or devices. Because the protocol is impossible to make secure, just disable all rndis drivers to prevent anyone from using them again.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2022/11/23/728

Better to not to have anything m$ under your Linux.

[dragorth]

Ok, you talk about of the kernel aspect you see from your seat.
A kernel is not just a software interface between applications and memory management / thread scheduling ... it does a lot more. To undestand, just compile a kernel, install it, boot it and try to understand how it works.


Mouhahahaha ....
* DOS is a kernel not a bootloader.
* Windows 3.x is a graphical application running on a DOS kernel.
* Linux is a kernel.
* GNU/Linux is an OS.

There is no such OS as GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux at best is a set of bases many OS Distros use, but not all Linux based Distros use it, such as Alpine based on the Musl libc.

WSL2 uses Microsoft's Hyper-V to boot the custom kernel that I linked to. It is the Linux kernel. What part of that you don't understand is beyond me. It is configured to not include a lot of things not needed, which is the same thing you can do with any Distro's kernel and do for Gentoo for example.

WSL2 emulates a specific PC and uses Hardware Virtualization to create a Linux machine that sees itself as a separate computer, just like every other virtualization software.

[ll1025]

ll1025 puh...calling WINE an emulator is quite the stunt. But with the rest you're right. WINE (and for all I understand WSL1) isn't modifying any system calls etc, it's merely redirecting them. That's why they have to rewrite all those dlls and provide them in order for Windows programs to work. You could say it's also using emulation by sending DirectX to a translator that translates it to OpenGL/Vulkan, but other than that there's a reason for the name "WINE is not an emulator".

The name is a pun on acronyms like "GNU", doubly humourous because WINE is, in fact, emulating the Windows API.

For more information, see the discussion here:

For practical purposes Wine is an emulator, or at least it does what most people would expect an emulator to do, even if technically it isn't just an emulator. See the FAQ for a good explanation. This also follows great traditions in Unix naming, cf. GNU's Not Unix. :-)

While it is not emulating different CPUs-- so it's not the more notoriously-bad-performing type of emulator-- it is absolutely emulating a Windows subsystem, down to creating a virtual C: drive and registry.

[Vistaus]

Summary of this thread: “Microsoft is still continuing their EEE strategy”.

[dragon321]

WSL1 is the Linux API over the NT Subsystem infrastructure

WSL1 isn't using NT subsystem infrastructure. WSL1 is using something called pico process. It's something like isolated environment running on top of kernel, more separated from kernel than normal processes or subsystems are. Kernel is also not trying to manage user space memory in pico process, user space library ntdll.dll is not even mapped to that process. All system calls or exceptions are passed to the pico provider that needs to handle them. In WSL1 pico provider implemented Linux system calls and translated them into NT system calls.

Compared to NT subsystem this is much more isolated from OS. NT Subsystems were supposed to be equal for kernel so POSIX process for kernel wouldn't be much different than Win32 process or OS/2 process. Also POSIX subsystem in Windows NT didn't run any foreign binaries, all POSIX applications needed to be recompile for it and used PE binary format like any other Windows application.

[Ironmask]

Ok, you talk about of the kernel aspect you see from your seat.
A kernel is not just a software interface between applications and memory management / thread scheduling ... it does a lot more. To undestand, just compile a kernel, install it, boot it and try to understand how it works.


Mouhahahaha ....
* DOS is a kernel not a bootloader.
* Windows 3.x is a graphical application running on a DOS kernel.
* Linux is a kernel.
* GNU/Linux is an OS.

And now I know you're trolling.
That or you're underage.

[TNZfr]

... It's a custom kernel, what are you not understanding about this? It's been customized and had a lot of things ripped out because it doesn't need any of that. It doesn't need GRUB or Systemd or any of that because Windows supplies that functionality through a custom Hyper-V implementation and Linux drivers. Why would it need GRUB? Windows is booting it. In fact, their Linux fork deviates from standard desktop Linux so much that they had to change a lot just to let Systemd run at all. Same for the graphics stack, it's an actual engineering effort to get their fork to interact with the Windows desktop.

Ok, you talk about of the kernel aspect you see from your seat.
A kernel is not just a software interface between applications and memory management / thread scheduling ... it does a lot more. To undestand, just compile a kernel, install it, boot it and try to understand how it works.

And the rest of this is nonsense/technobabble.
Not even sure what "Android is like Windows/DOS" (Windows 1.x-3.x?), they're not even remotely comparable. Windows 3.x is genuinely a full OS with memory manager and everything, DOS was basically just the bootloader. Linux is an OS, it has a memory manager and driver stack and everything else, Android is pretty much just a display server and a custom JVM that apps are forced to run on.
I don't know if you're drunk or just trying really hard to sound smart.

Mouhahahaha ....
* DOS is a kernel not a bootloader.
* Windows 3.x is a graphical application running on a DOS kernel.
* Linux is a kernel.
* GNU/Linux is an OS.

[chocolate]

What's the userbase saying about it and is it simply a toy that lets those in Windows-land play but with no serious look towards production-level use.

I imagine it's popular among web developers who would develop inside containers regardless, but engineering firms all over Europe are not picking it up despite enforcing Windows as a host on development laptops and then Linux VMs for getting stuff done.
I tried proposing it and demoing it to boomers to avoid sharing huge VM images and to make a serious attempt at standardizing around containers even for embedded development, but I found WSL2 atrocious myself. Also, it's hard to sell new technologies to people that are so accustomed to their "old and proven" method, and there aren't enough young developers to care about it. There are very few non-boomers left in the field developing serious embedded software and the statistics are bleak for new generations. There are younger folks being hired to do documentation & coding but since there are no embedded developers to be found, HR resorts to hiring desperate people from Physics and Mathematics and other fields with no real software background (they might know some MATLAB or Python for research purposes).

Anyway, the best way to describe WSL2 without exaggeration is that it's slow to the point of making you feel uneasy for the time wasted waiting at the prompt for simple file operations; git operations are affected as well, and small commits feel like they take forever to prepare compared to bare metal Linux. Mind you, this is on recent 10th+ gen Intel laptops with decent SSDs.
I would still recommend it if you're a prisoner of Microsoft-centric IT departments and want to automate the process of setting up a Linux development environment with specific toolchains, but I fear performance will always be disappointing.
Skilled workers (a handful of enlightened boomers included) resort to violating company policy and only using the company laptop as an interface for internal networks, then they go on with their life using Macs or Linux machines.

The heart of the problem is that management sees the one IT department as a catch-all solution for every other department's needs. Engineering departments would greatly benefit from a separate IT capable of administering Unix machines and/or enforcing alternative solutions like WSL(1? 2? I only tried 2) and containers. But then again, Unix administrators cost more than 18 year olds with a couple of "I know Windows stuff" certificates.

tl;dr In Europe, WSL(1/2) hasn't won over (even more awful) VirtualBox VMs for engineering/embedded development.

For the record, Microsoft has already lost the desktop space. Only Microsoft knows this, nobody else.

This is not meant as an "ackchooallee" but Ubuntu did have a bug number 1 about Windows being the primary "desktop" (more like, user-facing) OS and it was marked as fixed due to... Android being more popular, I think (that might have been explained by Shuttleworth himself, even, in a blog post of his; sorry, I'm super lazy). Cheers.

[skeevy420]

What are the file system benefits of Linux?
I don't care much about the file system, it it is invisible to me, ext4 and NTFS both work the same for me, and I don't really notice any difference.

Encryption and compression, layers like LUKS and LVM, and more. A lot of it you can do on Windows, I just prefer the Linux Way. Regardless of the OS, once configured, file systems should be invisible to you (unless you're doing something file system specific like taking a snapshot).

For my use-case -- WSL2 is to OpenZFS what Proton is to Games. Basically, I don't trust the ZFS on Windows driver yet and its easy enough to compile a custom kernel for WSL2 to use. I can put all my games on my 3-disk RaidZ and I don't have to do all that cross-platform disk juggling bullshit when I switch operating systems.

[Artim]

ll1025 puh...calling WINE an emulator is quite the stunt. But with the rest you're right. WINE (and for all I understand WSL1) isn't modifying any system calls etc, it's merely redirecting them. That's why they have to rewrite all those dlls and provide them in order for Windows programs to work. You could say it's also using emulation by sending DirectX to a translator that translates it to OpenGL/Vulkan, but other than that there's a reason for the name "WINE is not an emulator".