flinux

Before WSL, the best ways to run unmodified Linux binaries inside Windows were CoLinux and flinux. http://www.colinux.org/ https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux flinux essentially had the architecture of WSL1, while CoLinux was more like WSL2 with a Linux kernel side-loaded. Cygwin was technically the correct approach: native POSIX binaries on Windows rather than hacking in some foreign Linux plumbing. Since it was merely a lightweight DLL to link to (or a bunch of them), it also kept the cruft low without messing with ring 0. However, it lacked the convenience of a CLI package manager back then, and I remember being hooked on CoLinux when I had to work on Windows.

Here's an example: https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux/wiki/Dynamic-Binary-Tra.... You don't have to push everything to the stack, but that's definitely an option–it wouldn't interfere with the red zone because you'd be pushing in the opposite direction.

Network filesystems are not perfect but they sure try very hard in a far more challenging environment than two subsystems on the same machine to give a "unified" access to the filesystem. It blows my mind that Windows engineers are building (and keeping up-to-date) an entire Linux compatible subsystem. That's a huge investment​, and a pile of hairy legacy code if the project should ever die. Considering that multiple efforts by others[1][2][3][4][5], some of them working alone, have gotten quite far in running Linux binaries on Windows without any of the deep knowledge of Windows internals that Microsoft would have, maybe it's not all that huge of an investment... then again, the edge-cases are the hard part and MS does tend to like overcomplicating things. [1] https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux [2] https://cowlark.com/lbw/ [3] https://

You may be able to get https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux working actually

> And I thought it would be possible to throw a dlopen in a Linux program and load Windows DLLs. No. Execution mode incompatible - see e.g. https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux/wiki/Difference-between... for details. What would really interest me: how was fork() implemented by MS here? The same method as http://stackoverflow.com/questions/985281/what-is-the-closes... or have different interfaces been created?

Also the more recent https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux

Interesting! I've been following Flinux [1], but it's not ready for day to day use. I hope this one will be soon! [1]: https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux/

A related project, flinux - https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux - allows you to run unmodified linux binaries on Windows. It is in the process of implementing all the linux syscalls...

Firstly, this looks brilliant. If anyone can remove the extra layers of cygwin, mingw, xming etc. and provide a direct ability to execute linux programs from powershell/cmd , I call Black Magic. Voodoo I tell you; Windows cannot be this user friendly (I work with it every day). Secondly, completely off topic, I noticed that Github picks up 0.4% of the code-base as Objective-C (https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux/search?l=objective-c) due to the files functionally consisting of a single line, `#pragma once`. Is this statement more common in Objective-C than C or C++ ? Just wondering if Github detects the language based partly on some statistical analysis of other existing code, or if it has "set rules".