this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Has anyone tried WSL on Windows ARM? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 days ago by InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] infeeeee@lemm.ee 19 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 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

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 7 points 3 days ago (4 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@programming.dev 13 points 3 days 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).

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 2 points 3 days 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@programming.dev 8 points 3 days 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.

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days 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@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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.

[–] infeeeee@lemm.ee 8 points 3 days ago

I remember a lot of things were not working. For example I was a GNU screen user, and no terminal multiplexer could work at that time in WSL1. They added support to tmux after a while and I switched to that and never switched back, rest is history....

The point is just like how not everything working ootb in wine, the same is true for the other direction.

They would have to invest more work which costs money, but if they just ship the linux kernel, which is already written, and the users already bought big ssds and have highspeed internet, so they could just use that for free, it makes more sense, and makes more money to the shareholders

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

even the old 'xp mode' for win7 was just a vm.

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 1 points 3 days ago

That’s interesting. I haven’t really used Windows since the XP days so I didn’t realize there was already some VM stuff going on to begin with.

[–] ggppjj@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

I think it's more convenient to their overall design of modern Windows, IIRC by default it'll install the running version of Windows to a hypervisor also. For their purposes, for the majority of users, there would be little to no performance losses.

[–] recall519@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago

Yes, I have a Surface Pro 11 for my travel laptop and it works well. No notable differences from my previous Dell XPS 13.

[–] PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago

Don't waste time doing that, just run real Linux.

[–] breadsmasher@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago

I have a surface laptop 7. You need to make sure ARM images exist, but apart from that its worked great