On Sun 2018-11-11 12:35:58 UTC+1100, andrew clarke (m...@ozzmosis.com) wrote:
> WSL's biggest tradeoff seems to be poor disk I/O performance compared to > native Linux (or even compared to running Linux in a virtual machine). > I suspect Cygwin binaries also perform disk I/O quicker than the equivalent > Linux binaries running under WSL due to lower API overhead. For apps that > aren't I/O-bound this isn't such a big issue, though. As update to this, Microsoft has been developing a custom Linux kernel known as WSL2 to run under Windows 10, which should alleviate a lot of the I/O performance issues under the current WSL. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/shipping-a-linux-kernel-with-windows/ The WSL2 code will also be open sourced, which I speculate could allow compatibility with binaries from other OSes in the future. --- This new embracement of Linux is quite an about-face from many years ago when it was seen by CEO Steve Ballmer as a threat to Microsoft. "Linux is a cancer", 2001: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ Though to put this into perspective, this was shortly before Windows XP was released. Most home users were still running Windows 98. "I may have called Linux a cancer but now I love it", 2016: https://www.zdnet.com/article/ballmer-i-may-have-called-linux-a-cancer-but-now-i-love-it/ Interestingly this is despite the proliferation of Android devices (which run the Linux kernel) being at least partly responsible for the demise of Microsoft's Windows Phone. All said, had the Linux kernel never been invented, I suspect BSD (eg. FreeBSD) would have taken its place as a similar "threat", and Google would've chosen a BSD kernel to run on its ARM smartphones. Regards Andrew _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
