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.
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).
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).
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?
It doesn’t. Macos also uses a virtual machine for docker.
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.
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
amd64containers.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!
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.
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
tmuxafter 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
even the old ‘xp mode’ for win7 was just a vm.
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.
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.