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Comment by pgtruesdell | Hacker News Reader

Yes, technically it is, but it's the integration that makes it interesting.

Plus theres the simple reality that Microsoft's got native APIs in Windows that enable running a linux vm with a KDE window alongside the standard windows environment. Microsoft has really come a long way and that's what's really amazing and kind of disorienting.

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You've been able to run Linux in Hyper-V for a decade now though, it's not really anything new beyond the client-side integration.

WSL2 uses it's own init system - only one kernel (plus a tiny initrd) is virtualized by hyper-v; each subsequent linux instance (distribution) is containerized. There's additional facilities that handle resource allocation dynamically vs the user specifying a static amount during VM creation.

These (and more) result in the end-user interacting with WSL2 the same way they would any normal application. To think of it as simply a VM isn't quite correct.

Sure but I could just run Ubuntu and containerd in a VM and it's the same thing. Or just run k8s instead...

Not quite. WSL2 dynamically uses resources as needed (`vmmem`), whereas a traditional VM requires allocating a fixed amount of RAM and CPU from the host machine.

So I fired up Ubuntu first for my current WSL2... then I installed a Kali distribution.. are you saying that the Kali instance is really just a container inside the Ubuntu WSL2?

No. A minimal initrd + kernel is virtualized. Both Ubuntu and Kali are containers.

Ah gotcha. Neat stuff.

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