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Comment by pedro2 | Hacker News Reader

I was expecting LCOW to not need Hyper-V at all and to use Windows' WSL.

I thought it was the whole point behind WSL -- to beta-test Linux containers support without the need for virtualization.

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Would be possible right when Windows kernel would support cgroups, network namespaces and chroot (2nd and 3rd are not implemented at all and probably will never be).

The point here I think is that "nobody" seriously believes in container isolation purely through namespacing. It's sufficient for some scenarios, but we can expect the hypercontainer-based OCI runtime to gain much more momentum. It's only logical that Microsoft will skip namespacing entirely and go straight to a unified Windows/Linux container runtime based on their Hyper-V investment. Hyper-V isolation has been the only production-approved runtime for Windows containers already, and it's how Azure Container Instances works under the hood (that's my understanding at least).

Hyper-V virtualization requirements are removed with this update. It does rely on Hyper-V isolation, which appears to have more in common with Linux namespaces than virtualization.

Virtualization isn’t completely off the table. The article mentions a minimal, LinuxKit-based hypervisor. I may be off, but I’m imagining something more akin to what’s happening on macOS via HyperKit.

I don't think you're right. Linux containers will keep running inside VMs (How else could they run? WSL isn't there yet and probably never will be.)

Not quite. It doesn’t use the existing Hyper-V management stack, but it does use the Hyper-V hypervisor and (trimmed down) virtual device stack.

Will the Hyper-V features need to be installed or will it be installed automatically?

I'm just curious because sometimes it messes with your video card driver.

You’ll have to enable Hyper-V. If you’re having video card issues with Hyper-V + Windows 10 you can email me and we can try to figure out what’s going on.

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