No Stupid Questions (Developer Edition)

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Do containers only work on their relevant OS (i.e. Linux distro/MacOS/Windows) + container engine? (lemm.ee)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/no_stupid_questions

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I think from what I've read that this is the case, but I've read some other info that's made it less clear to me.

On the second part of the question regarding container engines, I'm pretty sure that may also be correct, and it kinda makes me wonder a little about risks of engine lock-in, but that may be a little out of scope.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

If you want to run a container targeted for a linux distro on windows, you need some intermediate that will translate Linux sys calls to windows ones. I don't have experience with this but I believe that's what WSL accomplishes?

WSL1 worked this way, but this approach has many drawbacks (e.g. FS operations are slower on Windows, which can have massive impacts on Linux application performance).

Since WSL2 they switched to a VM approach - Windows and a specialized Linux are both running under a hypervisor next to each other.