File System Improvements To the Windows Subsystem for Linux (microsoft.com)

An anonymous reader shares a new article published on MSDN: In the latest Windows Insider build, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) now allows you to manually mount Windows drives using the DrvFs file system. Previously, WSL would automatically mount all fixed NTFS drives when you launch Bash, but there was no support for mounting additional storage like removable drives or network locations. Now, not only can you manually mount any drives on your system, we've also added support for other file systems such as FAT, as well as mounting network locations. This enables you to access any drive, including removable USB sticks or CDs, and any network location you can reach in Windows all from within WSL.

Comments

good

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad to see Microsoft fixing basic Linux problems. Perhaps this is the years of Linux on Windows on the desktop.

Re: good

[Anonymous Coward]

This is MS fixing MS problems on Linux. Linux can already mount all those disk types just fine.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are bug fixes (like this) touted as "new features" / "wonderful and thoughtful enhancements"?

Is this the new pre-alpha release strategy software vendors are using?

Windows turning into another Linux distro?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like Microsoft is headed rapidly towards migrating towards full Linux compatibility. Soon we'll be able to run WINE under Windows.

Re:Windows turning into another Linux distro?

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon we'll be able to run WINE under Windows.

I would do this for the stability alone if I could.

Re:Windows turning into another Linux distro?

[Anonymous Coward]

If i have a viable reason to run dosbox under windows...wine will surely follow

Vile company, vile methods

[Ferocitus]

Where will MS put their spyware after you've been "allowed" to do that all by yourself?

Re:Vile company, vile methods

[SirSlud]

Allowed to do what?

rwx is for suckers, windows has dac (delete append

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is soo behind the times, windows can even allow people to only delete or append or just create (haha!)

Any chance we can port this out

[Anonymous Coward]

ntfs-3g is terrified of touching a NTFS filesystem due to the risk involved with the journal not agreeing with the changes. Any chance we can reverse-engineer how WSL does it?

Re:Any chance we can port this out

[The MAZZTer]

It probably translates all the Linux calls into Windows calls straight into Windows' NTFS driver. So, probably not useful for what you're thinking.

Re:Any chance we can port this out

[Anonymous Coward]

They're waaaay too paranoid. Write support as worked fine, since well, the beginning.

Re:Any chance we can port this out

[Anonymous Coward]

ntfs-3g is terrible.

Paragon makes a great free (non-commercial use) NTFS driver for linux, and their paid version is cheap as chips.

Re:Any chance we can port this out

[tlhIngan]

It probably translates all the Linux calls into Windows calls straight into Windows' NTFS driver. So, probably not useful for what you're thinking.

Indeed that's what it is.

WSL is effectively "GNU/kWindows" where Linux ELF binaries can run on the Windows kernel using the Linux kernel personality that translates Linux calls into Windows NT Kernel calls and where security, filesystems, etc are handled by the Windows kernel as expected.

There's no linux code actually in the system (other than perhaps headers translating the syscall numbers into actual system calls). Likewise, networking is done via Windows NDIS networking, as well as all the other kernel services. Several times I had to sit down and figure out what was actually happening - I had to add an /etc/hosts entry and i needed to figure out how it worked. (Hint: WSL is a kernel layer, so what happens is glibc will look at /etc/hosts, so I should edit the ubuntu /etc/hosts, not the Windows one. The Windows one is used by the Win32 resolver, while the Ubuntu one is used by glibc, and the tools I was using use glibc).

Re:Any chance we can port this out

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it's closed, so it's impossible to recompile it to work with specific kernels when needed. No thanks.

Re:Any chance we can port this out

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it's closed, so it's impossible to recompile it to work with specific kernels when needed. No thanks.

Do you know how I know you have never used it?.

Re:Any chance we can port this out

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite subtle. To ward off any potential error, you ought to use some good hosts file management software.

Re:Any chance we can port this out

[Anonymous Coward]

How does a Win32 exe running under Wine open a file on an ext2 file system? Wine just calls the standard Linux API for opening a file.
How does a Linux binary running under WSL open a file on an NTFS file system? WSL just calls the standard NT API for opening a file.

(Remember, WSL is just another subsystem alongside Win32; it just calls into the NT Kernel.. Yes, Windows NT always was a 'multiple subsystem' OS, traditionally with subsystems like OS/2 compatibility, Win32 and POSIX subsystems running atop the NT Kernel -- Win32 is not the 'native Kernel API' but actually a layer on top of it, at it happens. For years, the subsystem stuff outside of Win32 was not used, so it's nice to see it coming back.)

Re:Any chance we can port this out

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used ntfs-3g extensively and never had a single problem with it. The only issue that requires attention is the fact that some characters are allowed in NTFS file names that Windows itself does not allow... just another case of MS software being incompatible with itself.

Re:Any chance we can port this out

[wildstoo]

Somewhere out there, APK's groin just twitched.

wow

[mattyj]

They ported the 'mount' command to Linux! How novel!

What's next, 'dir'?

Re:wow

[Carewolf]

They ported the 'mount' command to Linux! How novel!

What's next, 'dir'?

I think it is the drvfs that is the new thing ;)

Pretty neat syntax and rather flexible.
  mount -t drvfs D: /mnt/d
  mount -t drvfs "\\server\share" /mnt/sambashare

Re:wow

[The MAZZTer]

Actually the Windows command is "mountvol".

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they ported emulation of the Linux syscalls to WSL so that the existing mount command included in the Ubuntu distribution would work.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me know when they're done porting it.

I'm not surprised that the Windows subsystem for Linux can mount a windows file system.
It was almost interesting when I saw it could mount "other" filesystems, but they clarified that to mean "FAT" (as opposed to vFAT and NTFS I guess?).
At what point will it be able to mount ext4, xfs, reiserfs, btrfs, jfs, etc. And, further, the fancier layered ones that add encryption and/or compression, LVM, mdraid, glusterfs, ceph, etc.

Re:wow

[Blaskowicz]

Does Drvfs have a loop device? (or, if the question is wrong, does WSL have a loop device, working with no trouble on files on Drvfs volumes)
Does WSL have FUSE? If so there are a number of things that should be doable, some rather basic stuff like sshfs and curlftpfs for a start. There's a ceph-fuse package for example, so while you might not want to run a ceph node, unless you don't care about speed / CPU or warts I don't know about, I assume it might be usable to access data on a ceph data store.

Will Drvfs access "RAW" partitions that Windows doesn't know about or give a damn about? Then there's ext2 on FUSE, ZFS on FUSE, will those work?

But all the stuff in the linux kernel, I guess that won't work, nor will MS implement everything. That's some amount of work, with data corruption or a lot of loss if buggy. There are likely other workarounds : use hardware raid, Windows software raid, use a linux VM on Hyper-V, if that works with Vt-d / IOMMU access to a SATA/SAS controller.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah... but they named it "ls"

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

This is progressing really fast!
It only took what 20 years to mount an fs? In another 20 we can expect that ms paint will be able to open xpms? Woow this is happening just waay too fast!

Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we're seeing Linux becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Linux had an important place in the 1990s. Back then, both Windows and Mac OS offered systems that were nothing like traditional UNIX. So Linux stepped in and provided a robust, reliable, and very capable OS back when its main competitors didn't (Windows and Mac OS), were expensive (commercial PC UNIXes), very limited (Minix), or tied up in a legal quagmire (the BSDs).

But times change.

Mac OS X and now macOS have brought us an extraordinarily high quality workstation OS built upon proven UNIX-style technologies, but while still offering a superb GUI environment.

We've increasingly seen the robustness of Windows increase, and now we're even seeing it get better UNIX-like support than it has had in the past.

The commercial UNIXes are quite irrelevant these days, outside of certain corporate niches.

Minix has become irrelevant.

The BSDs are doing well, and are seen as among the most trusted server OSes.

These days, Linux finds itself lost and wandering.

It still doesn't offer a desktop environment that's as pleasant to use as Windows and macOS are, while they offer a suitable enough UNIX-style environment. It still doesn't deliver the extraordinarily high degree of reliability that the BSDs offer.

Linux has become a second-tier player across the board. It's nobody's first choice for a desktop environment. It's nobody's first choice for a server environment. Even in the mobile/embedded department, it tends to only be the kernel that's used, and even then it's buried under many layers of proprietary or custom software (like in Android).

At this point, if you want a workstation OS you use macOS, or Windows, or FreeBSD.

If you're running a server, you use FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

If you're working on embedded software, you use NetBSD or just the Linux kernel as a simple hardware abstraction layer (and almost totally replace the userland).

The need for traditional Linux distributions is coming to an end. I think that's why we've seen so much consolidation and so much thrashing around. Systemd, GNOME 3, Unity, Wayland, and PulseAudio are symptoms of Linux trying to stay relevant, but failing to do so. None of this software is as good as its competitors. There's no compelling reason to use any of it.

I really don't like saying this, but I think Linux has lost its reason to exist. There are better workstation OSes. There are better server OSes. There are better mobile/embedded OSes. Traditional Linux distros have no place. They have no reason to exist.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Mac OS X and now macOS have brought us an extraordinarily high quality workstation OS

Stopped reading here, you're delusional.

Re: Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

You wrote so much, and it's all stupid.

Put a note to yourself to check things in five years when ms goes full Android with win10 and wallet gardens up with only allowing uwp.

As for macs, who uses that old hardware for a powerhouse workstation in 2017.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Alain Williams]

Stopped reading here, you're delusional.

The pay cheque that he will get from some MS front will be very real.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

shills need to eat too!

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[LVSlushdat]

Man, you ARE delusional.. Linux is the ONLY OS that doesn't treat *your* data as belonging to either Microsoft or Apple.. I used/supported Windows for 20 years as a sysadmin but when I retired I decided I was DONE with anything MS.. And after seeing what a nightmare shitfest Windows 10 is, I thank my lucky stars that something like Linux exists..

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Mac OS X and now macOS have brought us an extraordinarily high quality workstation OS

Stopped reading here, you're delusional.

The pay cheque that he will get from some MS front will be very real.

Because surely Microsoft must be paying people to promote macOS.

The content of his post is actually a pretty reasonable opinion if you parse "Linux" as "Linux on the desktop" in that context, it's really only the last line that is misguided. Obviously Linux is a mindblowing runaway success in almost every other computing market there is, but the desktop is absolutely not one of them and the sooner people are willing to admit that (rather than idiotically lambasting anybody who calls it out as a "shill") the sooner it can be fixed to become a real contender on the desktop.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[chipschap]

It still doesn't offer a desktop environment that's as pleasant to use as Windows .../p>

I wouldn't characterize the Windows desktop environment as "pleasant to use" in any way, shape or form. I realize it's a matter of individual taste, but I've heard very few people (other than someone on the MS payroll) describe Windows as pleasant.

Now, I don't know that I'd describe the various Linux desktops as necesarily "pleasant" but I would describe many as highly usable and an enabler in getting work done. I wouldn't describe Windows in such a way, either.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Neuronwelder]

Thanks for you comment. I was beginning to feel that I was alone. Feeling uneasy with the reaching of any OS into Linux. I fear security will be compromised, somehow..

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is the ONLY OS that doesn't treat *your* data as belonging to either Microsoft or Apple.

I would like to see some actual evidence of these assertions, it seems that the existence of telemetry then got extrapolated by some people to mean that everything on your computer belongs to the OS vendor when there is actually no evidence of this whatsoever. It's just hyperbole pushed by sensationalists.

If I put a document on my C: then precisely how does this belong to Microsoft?

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going join the chorus calling BS on this post, but since it has already been picked over, I'll just take these scraps:

if you want a workstation OS you use macOS, or Windows, or FreeBSD.

Plenty of developers that I have met and worked with prefer some flavor of Linux because they get a *nix-based system to test on that matches or closely approximates the platform they'll be deploying on, and, unlike macOS, they can customize the desktop environment to their workflow rather than conforming their workflow to the desktop environment. And WSL is still a sad April Fools joke to them.

If you're running a server, you use FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

You don't work anywhere near IT, do you? Of the servers I've stood up for corporate or client requests in the last 5 years, I'd say the breakdown has been about 80% RHEL, 20% Ubuntu, and a maybe a handful of BSD servers, most of which were basically networking appliances that happened to be built on BSD. I'm sure BSD stuff makes for a fine server, but to claim that BSD dominates Linux in usage in the server space is just delusional.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is the ONLY OS that doesn't treat *your* data as belonging to either Microsoft or Apple.

I would like to see some actual evidence of these assertions, it seems that the existence of telemetry then got extrapolated by some people to mean that everything on your computer belongs to the OS vendor when there is actually no evidence of this whatsoever. It's just hyperbole pushed by sensationalists.

If I put a document on my C: then precisely how does this belong to Microsoft?

Have you read the privacy policy?

"We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to protect our customers or enforce the terms governing the use of the services."

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus the current Windows environment looks like it was designed by someone with a ruler.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pointless chime-in, but "me too". I used Icewm not because it's "pleasant" but because it "sucks less" (for me) than any other WM I've used. It's a really low bar, too.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also BSD, FreeDOS, Reactos, Haiku...

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has stolen my datas and my privacies, they are so evil pls halp!

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[LordWabbit2]

Who the fuck modded you up? Linux is a pain to configure, 90% of anything needs to be done via the command line, that is not "pleasant".
Reminds me of a quote from bash.org

it only takes three commands to install Gentoo
cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6
that's the first one

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[jimtheowl]

I don't want to give too much credence to your 90% statement as statistics are 97% made up. I mostly use BSD, but Linux comes across as quite usable from the desktop; much more than Windows where they keep changing everything around with every version. The first thing I have to do when opening the Control Pannel is type what I want in the search field.

But what is impressive in your statement is that you actually can do this stuff from the command line. You see, computers are all about automation, and that means the ability to re-use your work. You can put it in a script so you don't have to type it again and share it with the world. Mouse clicks are forever wasted.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck modded you up? Linux is a pain to configure, 90% of anything needs to be done via the command line, that is not "pleasant".

-1, very poor troll from 20 years ago

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Have you read the privacy policy?

Yes, I have. It's at
https://privacy.microsoft.com/...

Your paraphrasing leaves out some important bits. It says, under the "Reasons we share personal data" section:

  Finally, we will access, transfer, disclose, and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails in Outlook.com, or files in private folders on OneDrive), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to:

1. comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process, including from law enforcement or other government agencies;
2. protect our customers, for example to prevent spam or attempts to defraud users of our products, or to help prevent the loss of life or serious injury of anyone;
3. operate and maintain the security of our products, including to prevent or stop an attack on our computer systems or networks; or
4. protect the rights or property of Microsoft, including enforcing the terms governing the use of the services - however, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property of Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer's private content ourselves, but we may refer the matter to law enforcement.

The Privacy FUD towards Microsoft gets old.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Highdude702]

My hatred for Microsoft products comes from the plethora of exploits after EVERY update. Yes its possible on Linux also, but is very few and far between and they get fixed almost instantaneously not "next month" like Microsoft does.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I really don't like saying this, but I think Linux has lost its reason to exist. There are better workstation OSes. There are better server OSes. There are better mobile/embedded OSes. Traditional Linux distros have no place. They have no reason to exist.

Huh. You must be from a parallel universe then.

More often than not when you shop online, you're interacting with Magento on a Linux box. If you're browsing for information on automobiles, you're interacting with Magento on a Linux box. If you shop on Newegg, B&H, etc. you're interacting with Magento on a Linux box. If you're looking at a food manufacturer's site, you're interacting with Magento, Wordpress, or Drupal, on a Linux box. If you use your bank's web site the back end is usually a java stack running on Linux, with nginx or apache proxypass to the java back end - again, on Linux, or a websphere fork of apache on - yes, you guessed it: Linux.

That isn't to say IIS servers are nonexistent; it's just that when you need to deal with a high volume of traffic, more often than not you're going to have Linux servers comprising a large portion of the solution.

It's also worth noting that many if not most SAN appliances run Linux.

Also, high frequency trading (ick!) systems - you guessed it: Linux.

And, it's "traditional distros" like RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, and on occasion, SLES (yes, SUSE is still used in enterprise solutions!)

> If you're running a server, you use FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

If you think that you'd be shocked to learn how rare BSD is in production.

Linux is also making huge inroads into vehicles for the infotainment systems, usually as part of an android stack.

Linux is not dying by a long shot. Windows has seen significant growth in hosting since Server Core came into being, but the growth has not been at the expense of Linux.

Re: Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

> and wallet gardens up with only allowing uwp.

Going by past experience, in 5 years UWP will be dead and replaced by something else that will keep developers having to rewrite everything - or move to more stable environments.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[mcswell]

I run a Windows desktop at home, and Windows at work. (For various reasons, one of which is I have a self-written keyboard remapper that would be hard to port to Linux because of the way it hooks into the OS. At least I've never figured out how to do it.)

But I do all my software development on Linux. It's just easier than on Windows. And from what I've heard, I'm the kind of person bash-in-Windows is intended for. I've already gotten rid of CygWin on my home Windows machine in favor of this new bash-in-Windows. If I had bash and other Linux utilities on my work computer, I could dispense with most of the need for logging into a separate Linux computer from Windows, using sftp (which btw broke the other day for Java-based programs, after we did a Java update; unclear as yet why).

So at this point Linux is definitely not irrelevant to me. When this Linux-in-Windows becomes available on my work computer, I may no longer need a separate Linux computer for most of what I do. (It would still be useful for heavy duty compiles, large data processing, etc.)

I will also say that I find Windows 10 terminally ugly, as compared with Win7 and XP. I'm guessing I would find some Linux desktop easier on the eyes, but I haven't experimented enough with that, and I suppose that's not a major consideration.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[mcswell]

Someone else (me) said that if Windows were an Indiana Jones movie, then Win7 and XP would star Harrison Ford, while Win10 would star Lego blocks. I do find it terminally ugly, not to mention the fact that it goes out of its way to prevent you from telling by looking which window has keyboard focus.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a high quality troll. Everything he says is wrong but he says it calmly like he really believes it.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[chipschap]

Who the fuck modded you up? Linux is a pain to configure, 90% of anything needs to be done via the command line, that is not "pleasant".

Well, at least you're not an AC. But if you read my post correctly, you'd see that I didn't describe Linux as necessarily pleasant. I did describe it as highly usable and an enabler for getting work done. I can't dispute your 90% figure either way, but there is little doubt that the command line is efficient, usable, and enables you to do a lot in a short time. Of course, you have to bother to learn to use it. I find that bother much more profitable a use of my time than trying to figure out where MS hid things with their ongoing UI changes. Charms bar, indeed.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[chipschap]

You see, computers are all about automation, and that means the ability to re-use your work. You can put it in a script so you don't have to type it again and share it with the world.

And this is an incredibly relevant point, thank you for making it. Reusable scripts for a large variety of common tasks create enormous work efficiency. It takes a little time to set up a script, perhaps, but then over the next thousands of times you use it you reap the benefits.

Just as an example --- the University of Hawai`i wifi requires a login pretty much every time you connect. I don't need to start up my web browser and click through things. I took an hour to make and debug an 'expect' script that automates the process. It saves me maybe a minute every time I use it, which is sometimes many times in a day. Payback? Enormous over time. And that's only one script for one use.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[LordWabbit2]

Look, I wasn't trying to be a troll and bash linux (pun intended) I use Linux at home for my media center and file storage, and Linux has gotten more friendly - but it still has a long way to go before it's as user friendly as Windows.

A LOT of people do not want to use, or learn how to use, the command line.

Until the Linux developers figure that out (Mark tried with Ubuntu) Linux is not going to replace windows. It's that simple. You can spout the incredibleness of scripting and stuffs but if the windows person you are selling it to doesn't give a fuck you are wasting your time. BTW all of this scripting goodness can be done in windows, I always have a power shell open, haven't played with bash on windows yet.

And just to clarify I use the command line all the time, be it in windows or linux.

Re:Linux is sadly becoming irrelevant.

[chipschap]

A LOT of people do not want to use, or learn how to use, the command line.

    Until the Linux developers figure that out (Mark tried with Ubuntu) Linux is not going to replace windows. It's that simple.

Actually, even as a Linux fan, I have to take the other side and say Linux is NEVER going to replace Windows. And I don't even try to sell it to established Windows users. Linux attracts its own audience, which will stay a minority. I'm okay with that.

(This is not an elitist thing, by the way. To each his own. Linux appeals to me, Windows does not, end of story.)

What is it?

[freeze128]

What is the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and why would I want to use it? Can't linux already mount SMB shares? I don't understand this.

Re:What is it?

[markhb]

It's an Ubuntu subsystem on Windows 10 that allows you to run (some) ELF binaries directly from within the Windows environment.

Re:What is it?

[brianerst]

It's basically an Ubuntu (?) distribution that runs within Windows - not as an emulation / WM but as a subsystem that converts the Linux ABI into Windows calls. A very large chunk of the user space Linux stuff will run in Windows now.

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Call it "LINE" for "LINE Is Not an Emulator", and it makes slightly more sense. LINE for Windows is kinda-sorta-not-really like WINE for Linux. Embrace Extend Extinguish continues.

Re:What is it?

[Dr. Evil]

So that you can use GNU software without straightjacketing yourself into a Linux desktop.

See the summary https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html#Summary

Web developers have been relying on MacOS for years to get a decent Unix environment. MS is looking to take that market before Apple comes to their senses and starts manufacturing hardware again.

Re:What is it?

[wjcofkc]

You can now use any Linux distro as a subsystem. All-in-all, it's pretty great.

Re:What is it?

[wjcofkc]

I should also point out that you can run X-Windows under MS Windows. In combo with the subsystem, I have had no problem running Linux X apps under MS Windows.

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it is spastic and reflexive Linux hate for Microsoft & Windows that continues.

But do carry on. You only hurt your own image and reputation by doing so.

WSL is actually a great idea and anyone with an "open" mind can see that. Too bad the ranters from the open source community cannot.

Re:What is it?

[OrangeTide]

Oh my, how you youngsters so quickly forget the Halloween documents.

Re:What is it?

[aliquis]

There's no such thing as X-Windows.

The system is called X Window System, the last (large) version is 11, hence X11 or followed by R and the revision number.

The most used implementations today is X.Org and XFree86.
Wayland is in alternative to X Window System (as in not X Window System)

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow well done I think I completely disagree with you on ever point you make. Almost troll like :P

"The reality is that both Windows and macOS are much more popular than the Linux desktop for a variety of reasons and that UNIX-like environments are becoming preferred for many people"

  Nah they were always prefered by nearly all computer users. Control was valued then. Now most use have android with absolute zero control (ok maybe you can change the launcher if the moon is at the right angle).

"Free software is supposed to drive innovation"

  not sure where you get that idea from?

  "and the idea is the power of the community should be able to make great innovative software so why is the Linux desktop so devoid of it?"
Well seriously you are no engineer. But on the superficial gui level you are looking at you may have a point.

"Doing yet another init system or yet another windowing system or yet another shell is not innovation, the effort is being wasted on unimaginative, NIH changes that make desktop Linux"
Yes comrade we must not duplicate effort. Glory to the motherland and death to the capitalists.

Re:What is it?

[wjcofkc]

Xming

Re:What is it?

[wjcofkc]

If I wasn't drunk I would say clearly you haven't been using Linux for a quarter of a century but I am so I won't otherwise I would get modded down.

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget? No. Don't fucking care.

Get over it. Move on.

Re:What is it?

[dunkelfalke]

Since the Halloween documents there have been two CEO changes at Microsoft. It is not quite the same company now.

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it should really be called a "Linux Sub-system for Windows"?

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my, how you youngsters so quickly forget the Halloween documents.

1998 was a while ago now, near enough to 20 years ago.

Re:What is it?

[OrangeTide]

Sure, it is entirely possible that Microsoft has amended their bad ways and are on a straight and narrow course.

But with the long history it is quite reasonable for us to be skeptical of every action from them. I refuse to take what Microsoft says at face value alone.

Re:What is it?

[OrangeTide]

And the Vietnam War ended over 40 years ago, and people still question the US's motives in international politics.

Time may heal all wounds, but it doesn't guarantee trust, trust has to be earned.

Re:What is it?

[freeze128]

That's why I was confused. Microsoft also had some software that allowed you to map Novell drives on Windows, and they called it something like "Windows support for Novell", when it really should be "Novell support for Windows". I guess they just wanted the "Windows" name first.

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, but nobody cares about those people. They all just sound like crackpots.

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you seriously just compare Windows to the Vietnam War? Really?

Do you even hear yourself?

Really.

Re:What is it?

[mcswell]

Your real name wouldn't be Richard Stallman, would it?

Yet another decades-old Windows limitation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows requires file system drivers to reinvent the wheel. This is why, for example, you can only mount a volume to a directory that's located on an NTFS drive. Or, in this case, WSL is currently limited to using NTFS-formatted drives because they only implemented support in the NTFS driver.

On proper operating systems, all of this is handled in the VFS layer, which means each file system doesn't have to implement basic functionality that isn't actually relevant to the specifics of the file system.

Re:Yet another decades-old Windows limitation.

[Blaskowicz]

This might be a common theme in Windows, e.g. a printer or network driver implements rather high level features instead of a system wide layer doing it for everyone.
This might be backwards, have roots to 1993 or earlier, I don't know but a decade of driver compatibility isn't unheard of and the typical effect was : you use the driver CD included with your hardware, and you get your recto verso printer working, your scanner scanning, your tuner can tune channels or stations, your network card can do ethernet bonding (well, some high end Intel I guess), your graphics card comes with a GUI panel for triple buffering, vsync, brightness, gamma, texture filtering etc.

While under linux, you seemingly need an internet connection to install a word processor. Did you know, before broadband and on this side of the Atlantic, spending days downloading things from the internet would have quickly enough run a phone bill over $1000, what with there being 1440 minutes in a day.

Re:Yet another decades-old Windows limitation.

[drinkypoo]

While under linux, you seemingly need an internet connection to install a word processor.

If you're willing to jump through some hoops, you can get around that. You can manually bring home packages files, generate download lists, and then take them to some other location to make your download. It's pretty painful, though.

File systems

[Anonymous Coward]

As Microsoft seems to be really keen on getting Linux users over on Windows, how long until we can mount a useful file system, or just a file system that's less than 20 years old, on Windows, such as ext4?

who is it for?

[Anonymous Coward]

developers want serial port support and filesystem links, and they give us mount?

Re:who is it for?

[ThePawArmy]

And, you know, serial support... https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c...

Re: rwx is for suckers, windows has dac (delete ap

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it yet use emojis instead of drive letters?

Re:Hillary Clinton

[Anonymous Coward]

hillary/trump 2020!

sieg heil!

oh gosh, they can run FAT. how about ISO?

[zephvark]

The FAT file system has been coughing blood for 30 years. What's next, support for hard-sectored CP/M floppies?

Does this stupid thing at least acknowledge .ISO files yet? As everything else does?

Re:oh gosh, they can run FAT. how about ISO?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pure Ignorance on your part. the FAT file system may be antiquated and complete shit but it is still one of the most widely used file systems across the industry and building support for it is a fantastic inclusion. Or do you think Linux etc is complete shit for also still supporting it?

Re: oh gosh, they can run FAT. how about ISO?

[Anonymous Coward]

As Windows has supported mounting ISOs out the box since Windows 8, this means that this new feature also allows these mounted ISOs to be available to WSL.

Old tech

[Anonymous Coward]

This is DOS technology. You could mount external media and network paths for about 30 years now.

ZFS in Windows

[aliquis]

Please Microsoft.

Or any other file-system with checksums.

Re:ZFS in Windows

[Blaskowicz]

They're introducing ReFS in Windows 10, or un-hiding it.
It lacks quotas, compression, lacks quite a few things but checksums is what it is for.

Re:ZFS in Windows

[aliquis]

It can also correct errors? Not just detect them?

Re:ZFS in Windows

[Blaskowicz]

I think so, yes. Data scrubbing. I even saw a screenshot where in the GUI for checking a drive, you get a popup that tells you you can't run the drive check nor need it (in drive properties, whatever)

Maybe you have Storages Spaces for "RAID 1" or spanning drives with some parity, I don't know the details of that.
Don't look for NTFS specific features etc. though.

Cygwin

[MrKaos]

Meanwhile Cygwin already does this and much more. Essentially bash on Win 10 that seems like an admission that powershell, whilst powerful, is about as an inelegant and clunky as it gets.

As a fallback my colleague did a installation of cygwin on Windows 10 and it seems to be broken after working flawlessly since XP. I've got a new install of Win10 for testing cygwin on as the Microsoft offering is pretty primitive. I don't understand why microsoft doesn't get behind the cygwin project and make it better as it already does what they are attempting to do, only better.

Re:Cygwin

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you can't fork() from win32. The cygwin1b.dll implements emulated fork functionality but it is slow as shit after decades. By creating a native subsystem, you can fork/exec at the same speed of CreateProcess with the added benefit of being fully binary compatible.

There was an effort to add Linux ABI support on top of cygwin years ago, it worked for linux32 applications, it was called LINE.

A real subsystem is better in every way.

Re:Cygwin

[Anonymous Coward]

I have both the Ubuntu Subsystem and Cygwin-X running on Windows10 (64bit). Both work fine, Although Cygwin seems to get slower with each release of Windows. When debugging Cygwin, it appears, the compiler could use an overhaul, but for my purpose of logging into my more serious Linux boxes from my gaming computer, it is definitely doing a fine enough job.

Re:Cygwin

[MrKaos]

for my purpose of logging into my more serious Linux boxes from my gaming computer, it is definitely doing a fine enough job.

Thanks for the info. Coincidentally, that is *exactly* what I am doing.

Re:Cygwin

[thevirtualcat]

I was going to reply with "CreateProcess() isn't exactly fast." When compared with fork() in modern Linux, it isn't. But when I started digging into the Cygwin source to find the CreateProcess (or NtCreateProcess) that I knew it would inevitably call, I found it buried a lot deeper than I expected.

https://cygwin.com/git/gitweb....

Obviously, since WSL isn't open source, I can't dig into it and see what they're doing. But if I had to guess, I'd imagine they're doing something in kernel space that makes fork() at least as fast as CreateProcess().

It sounds like they have invented a Disk Operating

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like they have invented a Disk Operating System or DOS

Can you mount ext*?

[Anonymous Coward]

If not, useless... Then again it's still useless compared to cygwin!

Don't fall for it.. embrace, extend, etc. etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

By doing this they're really, really hoping Linux app programmers will start to get lazy and depend on, say, the MS-authored NTFS functionality or other things that subtly work 100% only with the MS Linux emulation layer. Then, once those become indispensable to enough 'Linux' users, people will start preferring to use Linux only under Windows.. then they can start breaking more and more Linux stuff so that there's no hope of a good experience under *real* Linux.

Anyone thinking of working on this whose job doesn't depend on it, should spend their time making real, native Linux do what they want, to avoid getting locked in.

bash in windows - whaaaat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand the drive behind this and the articles (like this one) discussing issues met along the way of running bash in windows. Just run bash in a *nix OS and meet the much fuller experience that those OS's offer anyway.

I do pretty well: You've done better?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to continue using the Host File Engine. Your software is well written, functional. The Host File Engine performs exactly as promised by mmell

his hosts program is actually pretty good by xenotransplant

his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources by alexgieg

I've never tried to belittle (APK's) work, I've flat out said it's good by BronsCon

take a look at the APK hosts file engine by SuperKendall

APK is kinda right. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works by bmo

I like your host file system by Karmashock

I find your hosts file admirable by vel-ex-tech

* My code's liked + recommended & hosted by Malwarebytes' hpHosts!

APK

P.S.=> See subject & show us /.ers saying that about your non-existent work "wildstoo" you FAKE NAME for your FAKE LIFE bullshitter... apkhis hosts program is actually pretty good