disciple wrote:disciple wrote:Assuming you don't need alsa or some special kernel module the most likely problem you'll notice is poor IO performance.
Looks like some (most?) of that'll be changing soon; not sure about alsa though.
Today we’re unveiling the newest architecture for the Windows Subsystem for Linux: WSL 2! Changes in this new architecture will allow for: dramatic file system performance increases, and full system call compatibility, meaning you can run more Linux apps in WSL 2 such as Docker.
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Microsoft will be shipping a Linux kernel with Windows
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WSL 2 uses the latest and greatest in virtualization technology to run its Linux kernel inside of a lightweight utility virtual machine (VM). However, WSL 2 will NOT be a traditional VM experience. When you think of a VM, you probably think of something that is slow to boot up, exists in a very isolated environment, consumes lots of computer resources and requires your time to manage it. WSL 2 does not have these attributes. It will still give the remarkable benefits of WSL 1: High levels of integration between Windows and Linux, extremely fast boot times, small resource footprint, and best of all will require no VM configuration or management.
So they've obviously realised it is too hard to try to reimplement Linux, like they were doing with WSL 1, and they were never going to get performance good enough.
Makes me wonder if they are trying to do "embrace, extend, extinguish" not just to Linux but to VMs.
I find VMs quite fast for lightweight versions of linux. For instance on this forum strechdog, fatdog64 and tazpup/64 all work well in virtualbox and don't consume that many resources. I've had some issues with a standard puppy in virtualbox. I think that with a standard puppy that we need to remove the part where it hides the cursor in the .xinitrd script:
Code: Select all
#v2.01 hide cursor when not moving... (setup in /usr/sbin/input-wizard)
if [ -f /etc/mousehide ];then
IDLETIME="`cat /etc/mousehide | cut -f 1 -d ','`"
[ ! "$IDLETIME" = "0" ] && unclutter -idle $IDLETIME &
fi
but I here that standard puppies work well in other virtualization tools like KVM and VMWare. Anyway, I like the isolation aspect of a virtualmachine and the guest additions of vitualbox allows sufficient OS integration.
Anyway, I'm sure that WSL will be quite useful but I'm sure it will come at the cost of more influence on linux by microsoft than we want. I don't use it yet because I'm still on windows 8.1 and I'm not very excited about the prospect about moving to windows 10, which is more than likely whenever I eventually get a new computer.
Also I suspect that microsoft will put annoying non standard restrictions on WSL (i.e. a non standard security model) that one won't have to worry about in a VM. Actually this is one annoying thing about microsoft. They keep breaking the features that they invent by changing the security model. Historically Microsoft has been "too unstable" and for this reason there could be maintenance nightmares for systems which depend on WSL.
As for systems getting extinguished by WSL, the more likely victums are cygwin and mingw. Both of these have helped make code portable from linux to windows systems and if WSL leads to the obsolescence of these systems the consequences might not be good.