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Comment by ampdepolymerase | Hacker News Reader

They can keep it hot in memory similar to serverless. If everyone uses the same base copy of Windows, then they can easily fork from one parent copy. A copy on write network filesystem + some Windows Registry and Explorer tricks can take care of the remaining 20%.

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> then they can easily fork from one parent copy.

Ironically windows does not implement fork()

AFAIK Windows kernel is advanced enough to implement fork if necessary. WSL 1 uses it.

Think at hypervisor level. Most VM solutions support some form of memory deduplication. VM level cloning wouldn't be too far from that model IMO.

This is exactly what VMware Horizon VDI does to create desktop VMs very quickly, called Instant Clone (aka VM Fork), and has been around for several years now.

With that, you don't even need to do deduplication after the fact, it comes for free. When a new VM is forked, it's memory and disk are copy-on-write from the source/parent VM.

Windows NT was POSIX compatible.

The ZwCreateProcess kernel api can do fork() semantic.

It is possible. But if achieving a reasonable performance was doable, they wouldn't need wsl2.

that's a non-sequitur. windows not being Linux at the same time that a Mac was also Unix is what created WSL 1, and the limitations of WSL 1 led to WSL 2.

Neither does GitHub and yet...

Windows Sandbox on Windows 10 is pretty quick to boot, and uses a base copy of Windows. I wouldn't be surprised if that's similar to whatever solution they've created for Cloud PC.

I've recently used it to validate/automate whether one of our graphics tool using d3d12 would work, as it had to be deployed on some cloud machine. With small amount of batch file coding and some flags to enable file sharing and DirectX I was able to do it (for some reason, could not make it automatically start the app, but since it was for semi-automatic testing, it was okay - if I tried more, I'm sure there would've been a way).

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