The new Windows subsystem for Linux architecture: a deep dive - BRK3068
Microsoft Developer2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2019–2023
talk · advanced · 2019–2023 on HN
A Microsoft Build 2019 session in which the WSL team explains the new WSL 2 architecture, which runs a real Linux kernel alongside Windows on a hypervisor. It covers faster file performance, Linux file access from Windows and better application support.
HN points to it as the authoritative source for how WSL2 works and why Microsoft rebuilt it.
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6 comments from Hacker News
If you're interested, the Build talk where WSL2 was introduced is pretty in-depth and does a great job of talking about the motivation. See starting around this point: ▶ this video
It’s happening at the hypervisor level, and in this case it’s Type 1, so I guess you could but I don’t know how. My ops colleagues are hanging their heads at me right now. You can learn more about the architecture of WSL2 in this video from Build ▶ this video
The WSL2 architecture video lists two motivators from WSL1 based on number of Github issues. One of them being file performance and the other syscall compatibility with some specific examples being the ptrace syscall and Docker compatibilty. ▶ this video The HN submission for the youtube video also has discussion about the same topics. link
> It seems the obvious way to do this was to have SMB mounts on either side and optimize the hell out of the already existing SMB implementations on both OSes to get the performance close enough to disk. That's basically what they're doing, only that it's not SMB but 9p protocol servers. Here is a video where they discuss the WSL2 architecture. The link is time-stamped to go to an overview picture of the architecture. ▶ this video
▶ this video WinNT Kernel and Linux Kernel are running on top of Hypervisor platform side-by-side .... not one-in-the-other.
WSL2 does use 9P, here is the BUILD session about it. "The new Windows subsystem for Linux architecture: a deep dive - BRK3068" ▶ this video