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.

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.

wow

[mattyj]

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

What's next, 'dir'?

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.

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?

[OrangeTide]

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

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: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: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.

[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.

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: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.