Linux

52800 readers

525 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Has anyone tried WSL on Windows ARM? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I know... I know.

But just out of curiosity about how it works. I remember back in some dark days of still dual booting getting curious about wsl1 and being fairly impressed. At the time I had a heavy gaming laptop and a Surface 3 I would take to class to keep my STEM student physic rather than going body builder moving an alienware around.

Having wsl was a neat tool to get started on some homework assignments before I got home to the real computer. Given that Windows ARM has been kind of a let down (or perhaps Apple just set too high a bar) I am curious about how this niche has turned out.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (10 children)

WSL2 is just a vm, WSL1 worked like wine, but reversed, only the name is similar, nothing else (classic microsoft...)

According to arm it's working: https://learn.arm.com/learning-paths/laptops-and-desktops/wsl2/ We could virtualize different architectures for ages, nothing special here. But I guess they can ship a kernel built for arm.

About these new laptops, I have no experience yet, but eagerly waiting for them to have usable bare metal linux support. Ubuntu supports development for them, some of them are already bootable, more info here: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdragon-x-elite/48800

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (9 children)

Why did they give up on the wine-like approach? That seems so much better than running an entire VM (not even a Microsoft person but still).

[–] moonpiedumplings 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Because one of the features of Linux that Microsoft is most interested in is docker/oci containers, but that is a feature specific to the Linux kernel (and thus requires a virtual machine).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I always wonder how Docker works on macOS with a more UNIX-style kernel than Linux when even FreeBSD gave up on the effort.

I understand macOS is way closer to Linux than Windows (despite its differences) but is it really that hard to do Docker/OCI out of Linux?

[–] moonpiedumplings 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I always wonder how Docker works on macOS with a more UNIX-style kernel than Linux

It doesn't. Macos also uses a virtual machine for docker.

but is it really that hard to do Docker/OCI out of Linux?

Yes. The runtimes containers use are dependent on cgroups, seccomp, namespaces, and a few other linux kernel specific features.

You could implement a wine like project to run the linux binaries that containers contain, and then run some sandboxing to make it be a proper container, but no virtual machines or virtual machine container runtimes* are easier.

Linuxulator, a freebsd project does the above.

https://people.freebsd.org/~dch/posts/2024-12-04-freebsd-containers/

*these are much lighter than a normal vm, I'll need to check if this is what macos does. I know for a fact docker on windows uses a full Linux vm though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Actually that’s a good point that I’ve completely forgotten. Docker uses the modern macOS APIs for virtualization these days, and uses Rosetta2 for amd64 containers.

Edit: Damn you’ve got me excited about FreeBSD again. I’m a much bigger fan of FreeBSD on bare metal but do love Docker and related Linux goodness!

[–] LeFantome 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

FreeBSD is supporting OCI containers natively. If the app in your container can run on Linuxulator, it will run on FreeBSD (natively on the FreeBSD kernel).

They want it to be able to host Kubernetes on FreeBSD.

load more comments (7 replies)