Linux

50552 readers

1328 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Has anyone tried WSL on Windows ARM? (self.linux)

submitted 4 days ago by InternetCitizen2 to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I know... I know.

But just out of curiosity about how it works. I remember back in some dark days of still dual booting getting curious about wsl1 and being fairly impressed. At the time I had a heavy gaming laptop and a Surface 3 I would take to class to keep my STEM student physic rather than going body builder moving an alienware around.

Having wsl was a neat tool to get started on some homework assignments before I got home to the real computer. Given that Windows ARM has been kind of a let down (or perhaps Apple just set too high a bar) I am curious about how this niche has turned out.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Why did they give up on the wine-like approach? That seems so much better than running an entire VM (not even a Microsoft person but still).

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Because one of the features of Linux that Microsoft is most interested in is docker/oci containers, but that is a feature specific to the Linux kernel (and thus requires a virtual machine).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I always wonder how Docker works on macOS with a more UNIX-style kernel than Linux when even FreeBSD gave up on the effort.

I understand macOS is way closer to Linux than Windows (despite its differences) but is it really that hard to do Docker/OCI out of Linux?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I always wonder how Docker works on macOS with a more UNIX-style kernel than Linux

It doesn't. Macos also uses a virtual machine for docker.

but is it really that hard to do Docker/OCI out of Linux?

Yes. The runtimes containers use are dependent on cgroups, seccomp, namespaces, and a few other linux kernel specific features.

You could implement a wine like project to run the linux binaries that containers contain, and then run some sandboxing to make it be a proper container, but no virtual machines or virtual machine container runtimes* are easier.

Linuxulator, a freebsd project does the above.

https://people.freebsd.org/~dch/posts/2024-12-04-freebsd-containers/

*these are much lighter than a normal vm, I'll need to check if this is what macos does. I know for a fact docker on windows uses a full Linux vm though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Actually that’s a good point that I’ve completely forgotten. Docker uses the modern macOS APIs for virtualization these days, and uses Rosetta2 for amd64 containers.

Edit: Damn you’ve got me excited about FreeBSD again. I’m a much bigger fan of FreeBSD on bare metal but do love Docker and related Linux goodness!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

FreeBSD is supporting OCI containers natively. If the app in your container can run on Linuxulator, it will run on FreeBSD (natively on the FreeBSD kernel).

They want it to be able to host Kubernetes on FreeBSD.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

I remember a lot of things were not working. For example I was a GNU screen user, and no terminal multiplexer could work at that time in WSL1. They added support to tmux after a while and I switched to that and never switched back, rest is history....

The point is just like how not everything working ootb in wine, the same is true for the other direction.

They would have to invest more work which costs money, but if they just ship the linux kernel, which is already written, and the users already bought big ssds and have highspeed internet, so they could just use that for free, it makes more sense, and makes more money to the shareholders

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

even the old 'xp mode' for win7 was just a vm.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

That’s interesting. I haven’t really used Windows since the XP days so I didn’t realize there was already some VM stuff going on to begin with.

[–] ggppjj 2 points 4 days ago

I think it's more convenient to their overall design of modern Windows, IIRC by default it'll install the running version of Windows to a hypervisor also. For their purposes, for the majority of users, there would be little to no performance losses.