Microsoft Begins Rolling Out Windows Subsystem For Linux 2

After announcing Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 just over one month ago, Microsoft has begun pushing out WSL2 to its Windows Insider Preview channel.

Hitting the latest insider builds on Wednesday is the preliminary WSL2 support, which most notably offers much faster I/O performance over the conventional WSL. WSL2 utilizes more of a virtualization approach compared to the original WSL implementation and by leveraging Hyper-V should yield much better I/O performance in particular.

WSL2 looks very interesting and is currently being tested at Phoronix. I should have out preliminary tests in the next day or two of WSL2 vs. WSL2 vs. Windows vs. Linux benchmarks. WSL1 continues to be available alongside WSL2.

More details on the initial WSL2 insider roll-out via the Microsoft command-line blog. Stay tuned for the benchmarks.

Looks like the #WSL2 release is imminent...

— Phoronix (@phoronix) June 12, 2019

If you follow @phoronix on Twitter, the WSL2 availability shouldn't have come as a surprise.