Testing Ubuntu's User-Space/Bash On Windows Is Going Well, Benchmarks Incoming

While many were commenting on my article this week about being burned out and frustrated with ads that I should take the weekend off, I did not, but I've been having a surprisingly stress-free time playing with Ubuntu Bash on Windows.

It took a while for the Windows Insider upgrade to appear but it finally happened last night on the clean Windows 10 Pro x64 install I did so I've been playing with it ever since on my Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 benchmarking system.

It's been working out surprisingly well with just various minor problems: the noted need to set your own nameserver to get working networking, a few oddities in its behavior, but all-around is largely working for running native Linux binaries atop Windows 10. Apt has been working out fine for fetching new packages from its current Ubuntu 14.04 base.

I've also got the Phoronix Test Suite working! I'm in the process of benchmarking the Ubuntu user-space on Windows 10 to then be compared to a clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (since that's what this current user-space for the Windows Linux subsystem is based upon) with the same system. Those initial tests will be done tomorrow.

I had to make a few tweaks to the Phoronix-Test-Suite Git but nothing major so far. Just due to some differences in the handling of files/symlinks that there were some silly issues encountered, but if you are running Phoronix Test Suite Git you can set the BASH_FOR_WINDOWS=1 environment variable to workaround those shortcomings in Windows' Linux subsystem. Many of the actual source-based tests are building fine and running within this confined Linux environment, but to no surprise, some of the tests are running into problems with this Linux subsystem beta.

Anyhow, stay tuned for the benchmarks!