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Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

> Run a hypervisor on bare metal, like VMWare ESXi. You get now each operating system to be running on bare metal just like if it's alone and on Windows you can definitely play those notorious difficult games.

This is exactly how WSL2 works. Windows and Linux run as guests under Hyper-V.

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This depends on which O/S one considers primary, and which are their requirements.

For example, this architecture prevents other hypervisors from running¹.

If one wants to run, say, a fancy filesystem that is native (to Linux) and/or stable, again, one can't.

If one considers Linux the primary O/S, they could give a shot at VGA passthrough - I assume that if the system supports ESXi, it should support VGA passthrough as well. I personally prefer it to a native Windows - besides not having to perform reboots (which is minor), I like to have a snapshottable system. The caveat is that if one wants a very stable guest, they should reserve the GPU for that purpose (I do).

[¹] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq

Hyper-V would not be able to run Red Dead Redemption 2. VMware ESXi with a Win10 guest OS can.

Wat? I play games all the time on my Windows 10 + WSL2 setup.... which is exactly as I described: Windows running as a guest under Hyper-V alongside Linux.

And you have RDR2 running in that configuration? I mean to run RDR2 in your Windows guest OS that runs under Hyper-V? Because I tried that and it won't run. I could only run it under VMWare ESXi

I believe the point he is making is that the games can run in the native Windows above Hyper-V and then WSL2 / other Linux installs can be run under Hyper-V from the native Windows OS.

As far as I understood it, Hyper-V is a native hypervisor like Xen or ESXi. So if you're using Hyper-V even your Windows is running as Guest alongside any other Hyper-V VMs and WSL2.

Yes, although it has a "root partition", which could only be Windows up until a month ago[0].

[0]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200914112802.80611-1-wei.liu@...

yes,

And I can have running wsl2 session with RDR2 running.

as far as I can tell, enabling wsl2 (thus hyperV) did not slow down windows in any meaningful way I could find.

I was also confused by this recently.

Enabling wsl2 enables Windows' "virtual machine platform", which Windows itself will then run on top of as a guest.

And yes RDR2 is running stable 100fps uwqhd at max settings on my machine under these conditions.

I tried to find the official doc that explains it clearly, but cannot otherwise I'd share.

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