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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

I was initially very excited for WSL2, but I do worry it will require Hyper-V to be enabled. I use VMWare Workstation and it’s a true pain to switch Hyper-V on and off. Also, I cant help but worry that this will somehow be a downgrade in some way... will it be just as integrated? Windows Firewall worked on WSL Pico processes for example.

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I hate the way HyperV messes up networking with its virtual network adapters. It gets complicated with a VPN or LTE connection really quickly. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong, but I’ve never found networking to work properly on a machine with HyperV enabled.

Switching to a virtualization model feels like a step backwards. If I wanted a virtualized Linux on Windows, I’d run a virtual Linux on Windows. WSL is special because it’s a middle ground.

For PC use you should use the default NAT switch that way your adapters stay physical.

if it needs hyper-v, then what's the point? how is it fundamentally different from just running ubuntu in virtualbox with a shared network drive, then? except where the terminal window is?

Because Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, VMs that use it can be faster; I've found using docker in virtualbox is a lot slower than using docker for Windows (which uses Hyper-V).

The tight integration of course. And not having to use Virtualbox.

Well, you won't be able to use Virtualbox anymore.. at least for 64 bit OSes :(

> Windows Firewall worked on WSL Pico processes for example.

In WSL1 they share the same IP addresses and TCP/UDP port space, while WSL2 has an separated IP address. I suppose there is some NAT to make the network working in WSL2.

At the end of Q&A part they mentioned that sharing localhost, IP addresses, and port number space (which is a WSL1 feature) may be done in future, but they have no roadmap for it right now.

Yeah one of the big selling points of WSL1 was the lack of VM.

why is that? performance?

Hyper-V and VMWare don't work well together. If your machine is running on VMWare (as do our development workstations), then you won't be able to use Hyper-V. This already prevents us from using Docker on the dev workstations themselves (which are Win10).

VMs give near-native performance, and it's not like WSL1 was particularly fast.

WSL1 was notably slow, because the windows file system stack is much slower on metadata than Linux.

The last time I checked virtualbox and hyper v can't run at the sametime.

VirtualBox 6.0 should support it. Still considered an experimental feature though.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E97728_01/F12470/html/hyperv-inte...

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