Until it breaks. I watched a colleague have to reinstall his laptop the other day because whenever he opened a WSL terminal, nothing happened and it banged the CPU at 100% and wouldn’t even shut down.
Have seen that a few times from different people.
My experience with that is that 100% CPU can happen if the WSL2 image is using more memory than available, and is then swapping. You should be able to check that by looking at the VmmemWSL process. There's also an option in the WSL config you can specify to limit the amount of memory it can use.
Machines have 64 gig of memory. vmmem uses only 8. That process just jams at 100% and kills it. You can’t terminate it as it’s not actually a process as such. WSL shutdown does not work.
Re:Windows 11 Insider Preview Build
by StableAlkyne on Friday March 07, 2025 @02:02PM
(#43293131)
Never heard of that happening myself, and I've been on a few teams that used it going back to the WSL1 days.
Not saying that it didn't, either. Just that it might not be a widespread issue
Re:Windows 11 Insider Preview Build
by thebruce87m on Friday March 07, 2025 @06:35PM
(#43295991)
> fixes everything I hate about Windows
It fixes the forced reboots? Or are these a thing of the past?
It's a huge step up from Cygwin, too, since it's a proper Linux instead of just POSIX compatibility.
If you want a fun rabbit hole, look into how the WSL2 and 1 interact with Windows. WSL1 was a whole new shell around the NT Kernel. WSL2 is more of a VM, but using the Plan 9 (yes, that plan 9) filesystem implementation to talk with Windows.