WSL

This is already happening. A few days ago Microsoft turned down a documentation PR because the formatting was better for humans but worse for LLMs: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/pull/2021#issuecomment-... They changed their mind after a public outcry including here on HN.

WSL2 is no longer using the NT kernel. It’s a full blown VM now that uses Plan 9 9p for file system interop. The new Docker for Windows uses an additional WSL2 distro instance, so it’s not very different from Docker for Mac. Windows Docker -> Mac Docker WSL2/Hyper-V -> Hypervisor.framework/Virtualization.framework 9p -> gRPC-fuse/virtiofs They’re the same setup really. If you want something like WSL2, I would recommend Lima (https://github.com/lima-vm/lima). Edit: Well, they’re not completely the same. WSL2 is using virtualization, but the WSL instances are actually using a shared kernel packaged with WSL (https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/blob/mattw-wsl2-explain...). So it’s a bit more optimized than standard MacOS Virtualization due to some optimizations.

>and I’m almost certain that when you run multiple wsl distros they are all in one VM, though that may be wrong Yes, they run as containers. From https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/1573#issuecommen...: WSL distributions (instances) are not VMs. They are best described as "containers" running inside the WSL2 VM. Each WSL2 distribution/instance has its own isolated: PID namespace Mount namespace User namespace (I believe) Cgroup namespace (And probably) IPC and UTS namespaces WSLg System Distribution (Windows 11 only) init process However, they all share the parent VM's: Network namespace Device tree (other than /dev/pts) CPU/Kernel/Memory/Swap (obviously) /init binary (and some other binaries that are injected in)

Huh. Seems like it's more interesting than that: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/899 > ...for WSL2 you only need "Virtual Machine Platform" (a subset of Hyper-V) and "Windows Subsystem for Linux" features, both available in Home edition. Also there's this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/faq#will-i-be-a... > However, recently both VirtualBox and VMware have released versions that support Hyper-V and WSL2. Learn more about VirtualBox's changes here and VMware's changes here. For troubleshooting issues, take a look at the VirtualBox issue discussions in the WSL repo on GitHub.

YMMV. VirtualBox couldn't coexist with WSL2 in the beginning, and even when support was officially announced by VirtualBox and listed on Microsoft's website, it still didn't work for a lot of people. I had that problem during 2020 and gave up, but it appears that others are having success in 2021: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/798

for reference: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/wsl/blob/master/WSL/install...

Some more information: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/blob/live/WSL/wsl2-inde... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/shipping-a-linux-... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/wsl-2-post-build-...