News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Windows needs a change in priorities. Parent comment

Re:Windows needs a change in priorities by mulmen on Monday March 21, 2022 @12:57AM (#30750461)
WSL is a threat to open software. At best a gateway. Anyone who believes Microsoft has changed is at best naive and at worst a fool. We have decades of evidence to show that Microsoft doesn’t change. The sooner you move to a new platform the better. And don’t bring Microsoft with you.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Windows needs a change in priorities by lproven on Monday March 21, 2022 @01:28PM (#30757083)
Strongly agreed.

WSL – both versions – are MS attempting its age-old "embrace & extend" move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.

Which makes me wonder: why? Do MS not have enough top-flight kernel engineers any more to do an in-kernel version of gvisor? https://github.com/google/gvisor

Others have done it.

Joyent enhanced the old Solaris `lxrun` environment to bring it to 64-bit and kernel 3.x or even 4.x: https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx

The FreeBSD Linuxulator does much the same: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Windows needs a change in priorities by chithanh on Monday March 21, 2022 @02:01PM (#30757523)
> I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.

As far as I understand it, WSL1 was a complete reimplementation and did not use any code from the old POSIX subsystem/SUA/Interix. In particular, SUA had a number of long-standing limitations (like when replacing open files) which were probably unfixable without rewriting everything anyway. It allegedly is a continuation of Project Astoria which implemented only the minimum necessary part to make Android apps run, but was refocused to run all Linux applications.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Windows needs a change in priorities by lproven on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @07:34AM (#30764831)
Fair enough, and thanks for the insight!
[ Parent | on HN ]