[Discuss] WSL 2

[Rich Pieri]

On Thu, 9 May 2019 22:15:20 -0400
Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:

> This 60 minute video from Microsoft answers a number of my questions:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwhMThePdIo

Will watch this later, but for now...

> Yes.  Using an optimized Hyper-V system developed for servers.

Pretty much what I figured. I want to see if they say anything about
the host OS being virtualized as with current Hyper-V.


> Both Windows and Linux will support the Plan 9 file server protocol as
> both a server and as a client.  This gives full filesystem visibility
> from both sides.  For example, their init automounts /mnt/c via this
> mechanism.

Very interesting. Plan 9 makes a lot of sense with how it abstracts
resources for distributed computing. Which, as a practical matter, WSL
is despite being on a single machine. Two-way launching and editing
probably are more beneficiaries of this abstraction.


> They are still using their own init and nothing was said about doing
> anything else.
> They mentioned that the way they are running multiple simultaneous
> distributions is by using Linux's privileged container system with a
> single instance of the Linux kernel
> supporting all of them which probably requires the special init they
> provide. As they are privileged containers, they said that you could

Also being able to convert a distro between WSL 1 and 2. WSL 1 requires
their custom init system and converting init systems can be fiendishly
difficult so having one init system shared by all distributions in both
environments makes a lot of sense given that capability.

-- 
Rich Pieri