Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Windows Linux

Windows 10's Linux Kernel Is Now Available (howtogeek.com) 201

Microsoft released a new Windows 10 Insider Preview build this week featuring the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. WSL 2 includes a real Linux kernel that lets you run more Linux software on Windows and with better performance than WSL 1. From a report: This is part of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 18917, released on June 12, 2019. It's part of the fast ring of updates. You can experiment with it today, although you'll have to join the Windows Insider program and get unstable builds of Windows 10 on your PC. Microsoft's Windows Command Line blog offers more information about WSL 2, complete with an install guide, list of user experience changes, and more documentation. To install WSL 2 on the latest insider build, run the following command in a PowerShell window launched with Administrator permissions: Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName VirtualMachinePlatform.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Windows 10's Linux Kernel Is Now Available

Comments Filter:
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 13, 2019 @09:49AM (#58755502)

    2019 will be the year of Linux in the desktop, thanks to Microsoft.

  • Downgrade? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @09:49AM (#58755510) Homepage Journal

    Seems like something of a downgrade over WSL1.

    The old one is very light weight because it's not a VM, it's just a service running inside Windows. Most software seems to work fine with it.

    The new one is a full VM and you get the accompanying overhead from that - primarily more memory used. You also have to move your files from your C drive to the Linux filesystem for best performance, presumably because Windows drives are now mapped as shares and everything goes over the network stacks and SMB.

    I think I prefer the current version.

    • Re:Downgrade? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @09:56AM (#58755542)

      To me it sounds like Microsoft's paradigm for cloud computing, which is to spin-up as many instances of a full operating system with all its overhead as many times as possible.

      I've watched the migration off of an AS/400 to a Windows solution running on a big chassis virtual machine box. Granted, the AS/400 wasn't as pretty, in that one had to use a CLI or clunky web interfaces written by a guy whose job was working with the CLI predominately, but there have been only thee physical machines over more than twenty years, with the current almost ten year old incarnation taking a whopping four rack units.

      In contrast the big chassis box that runs dozens of VMs and its storage takes up nearly a full 42U rack and a team of administrators to keep the box and all of the various virtual machine operating systems running and updated.

      • Re:Downgrade? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by EndlessNameless ( 673105 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @12:59PM (#58756796)

        Microsoft has Nano Server for dense workloads. And Hyper-V supports containers.

        So if you want something less than a whole user-interactive OS running another OS, then, yes, Microsoft supports that. You just have to download the right installers.

        Nano Server does support the Hyper-V role, so you could run a mix of Nano server and containers on a box running Nano Hyper-V.

        Nano Server is very small, not much bigger than ESXi.

    • Re:Downgrade? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fred6666 ( 4718031 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @09:58AM (#58755556)

      There are pro and cons to both implementations. I still can't compile my embedded linux distro under WSL1 as too many things fails. I expect it to work under WSL2.

      But there are already full VM solutions like Virtual Box. WSL2 will need to boot much faster to be useful. I expect it to be similar to Cooperative Linux. You boot a modified Linux kernel directly instead of going through a fake BIOS like a full VM. I hope it can directly access partitions, instead of a file system (like ext4) over another filesystem (NTFS).

      • by Holi ( 250190 )
        Granted my sources are from reddit, but the claim I hear is 1s boot times for the vm.
      • But there are already full VM solutions like Virtual Box. WSL2 will need to boot much faster to be useful. I expect it to be similar to Cooperative Linux.

        They reinvented colinux and now they're reinventing virtualpc, which they bought and then round-filed after using it for XP mode on Win7 x64 — which was not sufficiently compatible to run unpatched Civ2 correctly. I had to use the XP64 patcher to get Civ2 to run correctly in XP Mode, at which point, it began to work correctly on Win7 x64...

        Maybe Microsoft is in fact just not very good at this compatibility stuff any more.

        • A lot of the programmers who built things in the 90s and early 2000s have moved on from Microsoft, and not many people working there know how to do that kind of low-level C++ Win32 API programming. A number of projects have been trashed because of that. I suspect that's why they moved on from IE also.
    • I agree, I think. And you don't need to run hyper-V which is incompatible with some software. For example, vmware.

    • Pretty much, yeah. I had a short wishlist for WSL: get systemd working (so it boots init in the background); respond to the shutdown and reboot events (last thing that happens during shutdown) by stopping or restarting the init process and all others; implement cgroups (this is necessary to get systemd working) so docker (and lxc) works; and implement a PAM module that uses a device file to communicate authentications (so you're logging in via the local Windows LSASS, which means local and active directo

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I think the reason for moving files to the Linux filesystem is to speed up file operations. There were numerous complaints from developers over how slow WSL was compared to native Linux. Turns out it's because of all the overhead when doing file operations in Windows, since Windows allows antivirus and other programs to tap directly into file operations.

    • by Holi ( 250190 )
      Except disk access on WSL is abysmally slow. This supposedly fixes that
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I hadn't noticed, but then I don't do much disk I/O heavy stuff. It would be nice if they kept both so you could choose the most suitable one for your needs.

        • From the FAQ [microsoft.com]:

          What will happen to WSL 1? Will it be abandoned?

          We currently have no plans to deprecate WSL 1. You can run WSL 1 and WSL 2 distros side by side, and can upgrade and downgrade any distro at any time. Adding WSL 2 as a new architecture presents a better platform for the WSL team to deliver features that make WSL an amazing way to run a Linux environment in Windows.

          • WSL1 is harder to maintain so they will roundfile it and focus on WSL2 just as soon as WSL2 is ready for prime time. All WSL2 needs is some virt drivers, WSL1 needs all kinds of other stuff and still only manages poor compatibility. It's just like how Linux in a VM works great, and is always up to date, but colinux is always behind. colinux is still cool, but it solves different problems, and it's not as reliably useful as Linux in a VM.

    • I don't think so. Sure the kernel is virtualised but based on the summary if performance is better then there's no reason not to go for this. Remember this isn't a full virtual machine. The only change here is the addition of the kernel itself in place of the subsystem layer. If you can't afford the double digit memory overhead for this you probably shouldn't have WSL on your system in the first place.

      • Still Hyper-v is a type 1 hypervisor like VMware esx it MUST encapsulate the whole host to run underneath the OS. I just see no other way other than to take over your system even if Hyper-v is a bare metal virtualizer

        • I don't see your point. Hyper-V as a hypervisor is incredibly small, and shows almost immeasurable impact on the "host" OS and even then if you truly need to leech out every last bit of performance you can simply disable Hyper-V at boot.

          • It still a problem for gamers who have slight fps drops. It also makes audio software incompatibility as well as timing software and hardware due to the added latency. Wsl1 was perfect.

            Second, I have an i9. Fine and dandy for me minus security threats with hyperthreading. Not ok for those with an i5 with virtualization disabled so vendors can sell more expensive workstation models.

    • Exactly. The point of wsl was not to run heavy duty things but to write nodejs, mysql, unixy software to run terminals to etc. WSL did this well and much better than the ugly Cygwin.

      It was easy for beginners too.

      If you're techy enough to do heavy duty stuff and script and really care about i/o then put on Hyper-v which is also available or virtual box if you have home and run it under that.

  • but.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 13, 2019 @09:52AM (#58755518)

    lets you run more Linux software on Windows

    But I can just run my Linux software on Linux, without Windows spyware and getting locked into Microsoft's dumpster fire of an ecosystem and without ongoing license concerns and legal shakedowns.

    Microsoft doesn't get it. Organizations and individuals run Linux because they want to retain control over their own environments, not let Microsoft sleaze its way in to EEE.

    Go away, Micros~1. You've done more than enough damage to personal computing already. Please fade into the dustbin of history where you belong.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Where's Windows kernel for Linux to keep that thing sandboxed?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Why would you want to run Linux inside Windows, instead of Windows inside Linux? That would give you the performance and reliability of Linux, while also allowing you to run legacy applications. Who the hell has both a huge legacy need (such that they have Windows in the outer, most-convenient layer) but then also needs to run some random Linux app? Whatever your Linux app, there's probably a Windows port anyway.

    Microsoft should sell a "user mode Windows" or something like that, to compete with (and possibl

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That would give you the performance and reliability of Linux

      Sorry, no. When you get outside of crappy third-party device drivers and Microsoft's asinine pollution of the OS for non-technical reasons, the core of Windows is much more stable and consistent then Linux.

      Hell, right now I'm trying to figure out why a Centos 7 server always hangs on shutdown and needs a hard reboot. Right now, I suspect it's systemd related.

      Undermining of standards? Hell, FSF and GNU engage in that too. `fork()` is supposed to be async-signal-safe per POSIX, but glibc uses non-reentran

      • by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @12:21PM (#58756514)

        When you get outside of crappy third-party device drivers and Microsoft's asinine pollution of the OS for non-technical reasons, the core of Windows is much more stable and consistent then Linux

        You super scraped the bottom of the barrel looking for points to buttress your man-bites-dog argument. Linux doesn't follow posix for O_APPEND? Wow, massive point, good one. Not. If you want atomic write and atomic append as you are whining about then use pwrite for both and don't bother with O_APPEND, you're a big boy, you know how to do it.

        Whatever your bias, you do have to admit that Linux is the one with the well earned rep for multi-year uptime, and Windows most definitely is not.

      • Linux does not limit number of groups for AUTH_SYS, NFS does: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf... [ietf.org]. Or, strictly speaking, ONC RPC does, which is effectively only used by NFS. Luckily for you, or perhaps unluckily for you since you are trying to spew a load of crap out onto the internet about subjects you have a tenuous grasp of at best, there is a fix for this NFS brain damage: use the --manage-gids mountd option.

        Now run along, there are cloud to shout at and you are just the man to do it.

  • Yes, and you can run Windoze inside of Boxes. So? There are many ways to make a machine slower.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I don't care how accepting Microsoft gets of Linux, I still won't use Windows 10 because of the spying.

      They built Windows 10 to serve their business partners (and themselves) first, and me second. So I would buy it, and I won't run it.

      The reason I run Linux now is NOT because it is free as in beer, but because it is free as in speech (and because it does not goddamn spy on me!).

    • There are many ways to make a machine slower.

      In the old days we had a button right on the front for that.

  • and some command line tools like git and mvn, you're better off using MSYS2 [msys2.org], it is much more light-wight than WSL and has great Windows integration, you can directly run Windows commands like
    alias n='C:/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe'
    n ~/.bashrc

    Most Unix tools are available with pacman package manager.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      As a real Bash programmer, seeing a letter drive being used like that made me throw up in my mouth a little.

      • As a real Bash programmer, seeing a letter drive being used like that made me throw up in my mouth a little.

        I think you need to go back to bash temple so you can unlearn your bad habits, young padewan. You can't alias away the evil drive letter without joining the dark side.

      • At least under cygwin it could be alias n='/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe'
  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @10:12AM (#58755654)

    and just run the Linux kernel natively. Seriously, stop bending over backwards to accommodate Windows shit and go with what works.

    • you don't have to use it. it doesn't even come preinstalled so it won't take resources. having more choice is good for everyone, there are plenty of people that for many reasons can't use something else.

  • Completely wrong direction! We don't want a way to run Linux software more easily on Windows, that problem already has a solution. Linux. We're looking for a way to run Windows software more easily on Linux.

    • Obviously not in Microsoft interest, but yes. I've given up on using Windows, version after version, it just looks like they'll never learn how to make a system that doesn't self-destruct over time.

      Installing applications I download from the internet, using an anti-virus, having to care about their DLL versioning nightmare, updates that take hours, hard drive constantly under access which dies quickly ... all those things are showstoppers.

      I'm waiting for all windows applications to run in containers/sandb

    • Completely wrong direction! We don't want a way to run Linux software more easily on Windows, that problem already has a solution. Linux.

      Indeed, and now you have a full Linux on Windows. You're welcome.

  • If it's loading a whole VM, that's a no-go for me. Might as well just run my own VM with a distro and configuration of my choosing.

    For being able to do linux command line stuff, I'm happy with cygwin. If I want to run linux, I run linux.
  • by michaelcole ( 704646 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @10:19AM (#58755720)
    When does MS have enough market power to fork the Linux kernel?

    When are we getting special "cloud optimizations" and "proprietary extensions"?
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Read the license. They can fork the Linux Kernel, but any modifications must be released under the GPLv2. That means that everyone gets to enjoy the four freedoms.

      At the same time, this is evidence that Ballmer's claim of Linux being a Cancer is a lie (which he later recanted). Distributing the Linux kernel in no way forces Microsoft to release it's own kernel.

      On the other hand, if Microsoft is distributing Linux, can it turn around and sue other Linux vendors for patent infringement? We'll have to see

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Probably never. Unless the kernel team does actually support that move, and unless they put Poettering in charge of the kernel (which is never going to happen), I cannot imagine the kernel-team ever going along with that. Sure, they cannot prevent it, but there are numerous ways they can sabotage it.

      • a fork doesn't need the developers permission

        proprietary kernel modules don't need GPL

        Microsoft could make their own Linux, sell corporations on using it, then drift it far enough away in compatibility the customers can't go back

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Have you even read what I wrote? Because you certainly did not understand it...

          • It seems that he did understand you, but you're refusing to reciprocate.

            You stated that the kernel developers "cannot prevent it," but then you implied that actually they can by saying, "but there are numerous ways they can sabotage it." This is a claim that they do have control, and maybe they can prevent it after all.

            So you want to disagree with yourself on both sides of the same coin, and you want to be right on both sides instead of wrong on both sides.

            Proprietary kernel modules do not need permission,

    • Why fork and maintain yourself? What would the point be?

      • perhaps getting corporations to use and standarize on Microsoft's flavor of Linux (with proprietary modules) by undercutting price of competitors supported GNU/Linux, then one day making it incompatible, then jacking up price

        presto, have the control of corporate "linux"

  • Install Linux and if you need Windows, then install it in a VM.
  • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @10:35AM (#58755802)

    Microsoft has been throwing so much of its weight behind open source DevOps-y stuff lately because that's what drives the use of Azure for them. I think their long term plan is to stop developing Windows and replace its APIs with a virtualization layer on top of Linux. Their strategy is no longer selling software -- it's renting you capacity on Azure. Since they already have a perfectly good OS (lLinux, which they can roll their own distro of) there's no reason for them to develop a parallel one anymore. The challenge will be shimming all those ancient legacy applications into a compatibility layer given how radically different Windows' and Linux's structure is (files vs. API calls)

    Interesting times indeed -- I never thought I'd see them push so hard to make Linux users happy on Azure but it makes sense. What I worry about is the alternatives for companies who don't want to spend all their compute money on Azure and keep stuff in-house. There will either be a massive porting effort over to Linux (which might be the only choice soon) or companies who don't want to move will be locked into paying higher and higher license fees to get discrete offline releases.

    • maybe Microsoft should buy Wine.hq and rebuild wine with all their secret closed source windows stuff and then wine will actually make windows apps usable on linux, then they can sell their version of wine to run office and whatever else sells for microsoft
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I agree. The UNIX API (in the Linux incarnation) has won. It basically is the only way to "fix" Windows, nothing else will work. While an utter fail for MS, they probably are more greedy than proud in the end.

    • I wouldn't say it's the end of Windows on the desktop, but it does feel like Windows Server has only a release or two more before it's done. Azure is being built around open source systems, .Net Core and PowerShell are cross platform, and there is a ton of work being put into making Windows 10 a better open source development platform. Maybe that's all to get the Windows software engineers accustomed to working with Linux so Windows Server can slowly be phased out???
  • by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @10:46AM (#58755886) Homepage Journal

    I've put VcXsrv on my system along with Ubuntu for Windows and I'm actually stunned at how well it works. I started with the traditional x-eyes for testing. Now I run Krusader, Konsole, the Linux version of IPFS - that my Windows browser plugin utilizes, I've put SSH servers on Windows systems for remote access (buggy but easy to work around). I am thoroughly impressed.

    The only shortcomings is when I want to do things Windows handles. I can't really manage disks, which is something I would like to do. I need to build ext4 disks on occasion and I use a VM for that. I work at a company that expects us to have Windows on my laptop, but to do most of my work in the Linux world. WSL 1 has made that tolerable. I went from being in a VM half the time to just using the Linux Kernel that runs alongside Windows with few issues.

    Our I.T. department had no clue you could do this. They've challenged me to setup a Windows laptop hosting multiple full Linux laptops running a separate Linux Team Viewer on each. I haven't attempted that yet, and I'm not sure I can make it work, but it's an idea. I don't think it's the right idea, but it's an idea. (I'm thinking VM's might be the better choice for that idea, but none the less....)

    • For some things using vnc with a virtual framebuffer is more efficient than using X11. X11 isn't necessarily that efficient over network.
    • WSL1 is not Linux enough to run nfsd and Wireshark. Let's see if WFS2 can do that.

      I know there's an NFS server on Windows Server, but that's not available on Windows desktop. For Windows desktop you need other solutions such as WinNFSD but you've got to compile that from source so you can change the NFS3 file handle size from 64 to 56 to make it compatible with the NFS clients in VMware and ESXi hypervisors.

      • Playing with NFS on it was one of my next projects. I've got a Windows 10 home system at home I want to mount some NFS drives on and of course home doesn't do it natively from the Windows side. I found a non-WSL tool that supposed to do it, but it is poorly documented.

        • Good luck. Another possibility is running up a Linux guest inside VirtualBox or VMplayer, creating NFS shares from the guest, but the virtual shares between guest and host file systems are incredibly slow (if, say, you wanted to republish part of your host's NTFS file system or an SMB share as an NFS share).
  • by cyber-vandal ( 148830 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @11:05AM (#58755982) Homepage

    I thought everyone got unstable builds of Windows 10.

  • Does it run WINE [wikipedia.org]?

  • I have more available RAM in my computer by not having memory-hogging Windows 10 underlying Linux. Consequently I actually have control of the hardware without Windows anywhere near my computer, so you can keep your shitty ad-platform memory-hogging rights-stealing excuse for an OS.
  • Playing with an almost usable Linux. I think it was about 1993 and called Slackware. I prefer fully working Linux nowadays.

  • that actually works would be nice.

Avoid strange women and temporary variables.

Working...