Announcing WSL 2 | Hacker News Reader

Announcing WSL 2

devblogs.microsoft.com

53 pointsMikusR13 comments

> File intensive operations like git clone, npm install, apt update, apt upgrade, and more will all be noticeably faster. The actual speed increase will depend on which app you’re running and how it is interacting with the file system. Initial tests that we’ve run have WSL 2 running up to 20x faster compared to WSL 1 when unpacking a zipped tarball, and around 2-5x faster when using git clone, npm install and cmake on various projects.

They are moving from reimplementing syscalls to running full Linux kernel inside of a "lightweight utility virtual machine"

So how does that VM work behind the scenes? Somehow, things still need to be written to a disk and go through the filesystem minifilters don't they?

This is marked as a dupe, but searching I don't see another discussion.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Announcing%20WSL%202&sort=byDa...

Edit: it's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842817

Wow, this isn’t a translation layer anymore, this is just a straight-up built-from-source Linux kernel inside Windows. O brave new world.

I’ve seen a couple people wondering why Microsoft doesn’t just ship a Linux distro with a Win32 compatibility layer on top of it, and it seems like that speculation is only going to increase now. Windows is still a long way from that, but unmistakably drifting in that direction.

Having just switched my home desktop from Windows/Linux dualboot, to full Linux, this kind of makes me want to switch back to Windows. My only grievance is nvidia driver support lacking on Linux at the moment.

So they are writing their own kernel, but moving to using a VM? Why not use an existing kernel if they are moving to using a VM...?

It sort of seems like a shame to throw out the entire approach and move to something vm-based when it was already working so well, but I guess if it improves both performance and compatibility it makes sense?

This started as "Bash On Windows," got embiggened to WSL and now we're finally where it probably should have started; a tightly integrated VM running a genuine Linux kernel. This also obviates some of the shade that has been thrown at Microsoft's effort because this is no longer a reimplementation of the Linux kernel.

So both technical and political improvements. I have few complaints.

What's wrong with re-implementing the linux kernel? Why would people not like that?

> What's wrong with re-implementing the linux kernel?

I don't know that there is anything wrong with it. I do know there are those that don't care to see Microsoft rehosting the Linux ecosystem on a proprietary kernel and have seen WSL as more 'embrace, extend, extinguish' behavior. One imagines that view must moderate some given that Microsoft is now relying on the genuine GPL licensed kernel.

I believe I've hit my daily weasel word limit.

I know what you mean, but it’s important to realize that kind of thinking is a sunk-cost fallacy. Based on the GitHub discussions about filesystem performance, it seems like they had really hit a wall and there was no other way to squeeze more performance out without a radical re-architecture.

This is a great update!

...I'm still running Linux bare when possible, though.

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