I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
However, I'm not sold on it being a great thing other than letting you use sensible tools for text processing on Windows directly. Performance is actually worse than a VM for most of the stuff I've tried using it for (no, seriously, I get better performance for file access by using SMB over a private network interface to a VM than I do using 'direct' access to the files through WSL), and there's a lot of useful things (especially for IT professionals) that you just can't do with it (like recovering data from a dying hard drive out of an old Linux server).
The only file performance issues I've seen are when I try to work across the Windows and Linux file systems. I'm running a WSL2 Linux dev environment for my web developer bootcamp and as long as I'm not storing my project files on a Windows volume and accessing from Linux but instead working directly within my WSL2 Ubuntu 20.04 distro file system, there is no file performance problem.
I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
Back when I originally posted, WSL2 was still in it’s infancy and did still have some limited file performance issues even inside the VM environment itself. All the experience I had at that point though was with WSL1, which demonstrably has serious filesystem performance issues (though not as bad now as they use dto be).
WSL2 today does indeed have essentially no performance issues for stuff contained in the VM environment itself, and only limited performance issues for access outside of that context.
With respect, you've clearly not taken a look at WSL2 then, which uses lightweight VM to run a real Linux kernel image atop which each distro is hosted its own container. Net result is that you get 100% Linux compat, Hyper-V levels of perf (i.e. v. near native for most scenarios), and all the convenience of distros' that startup from cold in < 2s.
I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
The filesystem performance benefits are mostly contingent on you having all your data inside the container, which is not an option for me (I need access to the actual datasets I'd be working on outside of WSL as well without having to sync them manually).
The pass-through filesystem performance may improve a bit because of the switch to 9P2000L over VirtIO for file sharing, but unless they've decided that Windows Defender doesn't need to be involved, it won't be enough to mater for many potential use cases, including mine.
Also, it's not 100% Linux compatible. It still doesn't let you poke at raw block and character devices, so anything that needs to work with hardware directly (like all of the IT related stuff that it would be useful for other than a simple network console) just plain won't work.
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I think it's a good marketing move from MS.
However, I'm not sold on it being a great thing other than letting you use sensible tools for text processing on Windows directly. Performance is actually worse than a VM for most of the stuff I've tried using it for (no, seriously, I get better performance for file access by using SMB over a private network interface to a VM than I do using 'direct' access to the files through WSL), and there's a lot of useful things (especially for IT professionals) that you just can't do with it (like recovering data from a dying hard drive out of an old Linux server).
The only file performance issues I've seen are when I try to work across the Windows and Linux file systems. I'm running a WSL2 Linux dev environment for my web developer bootcamp and as long as I'm not storing my project files on a Windows volume and accessing from Linux but instead working directly within my WSL2 Ubuntu 20.04 distro file system, there is no file performance problem.
Back when I originally posted, WSL2 was still in it’s infancy and did still have some limited file performance issues even inside the VM environment itself. All the experience I had at that point though was with WSL1, which demonstrably has serious filesystem performance issues (though not as bad now as they use dto be).
WSL2 today does indeed have essentially no performance issues for stuff contained in the VM environment itself, and only limited performance issues for access outside of that context.
With respect, you've clearly not taken a look at WSL2 then, which uses lightweight VM to run a real Linux kernel image atop which each distro is hosted its own container. Net result is that you get 100% Linux compat, Hyper-V levels of perf (i.e. v. near native for most scenarios), and all the convenience of distros' that startup from cold in < 2s.
Can't please 'em all, Rich!
... can't wait for wsl 2 to be available in the slow insiders releases.
Oh, no, I've looked at WSL2.
The filesystem performance benefits are mostly contingent on you having all your data inside the container, which is not an option for me (I need access to the actual datasets I'd be working on outside of WSL as well without having to sync them manually).
The pass-through filesystem performance may improve a bit because of the switch to 9P2000L over VirtIO for file sharing, but unless they've decided that Windows Defender doesn't need to be involved, it won't be enough to mater for many potential use cases, including mine.
Also, it's not 100% Linux compatible. It still doesn't let you poke at raw block and character devices, so anything that needs to work with hardware directly (like all of the IT related stuff that it would be useful for other than a simple network console) just plain won't work.