Windows 10 Fall Creators Update and Windows Subsystem for Linux

Original author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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System administrators and developers! It seems like a holiday has come on your street. WSL, since the last update, the so-called Fall Creators Update, has become a full-fledged part of Windows 10. You want to use Linux on Windows using the WIndows for Linux subsystem ( Windows Subsystem for Linux , WSL), but you are worried that WSL is still in beta versions and is available only in the developer mode of Windows 10? Now you can not worry. The fact is that in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (WinFCU) WSL can be run by any user. WSL, this combination of the Bash shell and Windows that has been tested for over a year , will gain many new features in WinFCU .







In addition to the fact that WSL has outgrown beta status and no longer requires the use of developer mode, the following are worth mentioning among its new features:

  • Install Linux distributions from the Windows Store.
  • WSL now supports the launch of several Linux distributions.
  • WSL is available on Windows Server and Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines.
  • WSL now supports USB / serial communication.
  • Various fixes and improvements.

In addition to Ubuntu , the new WSL now supports openSUSE , the SUSE community distribution , and its enterprise version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) . In addition, Fedora and other distributions are expected to appear in the Windows Store soon .

If you already used WSL, your existing Ubuntu installation will continue to work, but this option is deprecated and will not be supported. In order to use technical support, you must replace the existing instance of Ubuntu with a new one from the Windows Store. If you don’t do this, you won’t get support from either Canonical or Microsoft.

In order to save old files, they are bestarchive with tar and copy to a Windows file system, for example, to /mnt/c/temp/backups, and then copy to a new instance of Ubuntu.

In addition, you can now install multiple Linux distributions from the Windows Store on a single Windows 10 system.

In order to do this, you must first activate WSL in the window Включение или отключение компонентов Windows, and then reboot the system. It should be noted that WSL is not active by default, and that after its inclusion it is necessary to reboot.
After rebooting, you need to search for a word Linuxin the Windows Store, select the appropriate system and install it.

If WSL already has an installed Bash instance, you can start over with the lxrun / uninstall / command. You can use the command line or PowerShell for this.

In addition to being able to install multiple Linux distributions, several distributions can now be run simultaneously. Each of them works independently of the others. Neither virtual machines nor containers are used here. This means that distributions will need their regular system resources. For example, I would run several distributions on a system in which for every working instance of WSL there is 2 GB of additional memory.

WSL itself requires minimal system resources. Rich Turner, Senior Program Manager for WSL and the Windows Console at Microsoft, wrote the following: “We do not provide [RAM requirements], as, frankly, there is nothing special to say about this. If you did not install WSL, additional memory is not used. If you enable WSL, a small driver of 850 KB in size is loaded for a short time, and then, before the Linux distribution is launched, it is unloaded. At startup, it loads /init, which launches /bin/bash. This leads to the loading of a driver occupying 850 Kb and to the creation of pico processes for initand bash. Therefore, in general, the WSL memory requirements are consistent with the requirements of Linux tools, with the addition of approximately 1 MB.

Linux distributions can also work with the file system of a Windows-managed host machine, with a network stack, and so on. This means that data modification in the Windows file system should be treated with caution.

Why might you need to run multiple Linux distributions at the same time? Microsoft says the following: “The ability to run different Linux distributions allows you to use the same tools, package managers, or ecosystems and the environment where your production code will run. This leads to a reduction in the time spent searching for hard-to-detect errors when deploying code. This allows, for example, using Edge, Chrome, and Firefox browsers on Windows to view a website running on an Apache server installed on Ubuntu that interacts with a REST service running on openSUSE ... without having to set firewall rules for local testing, so how all these processes work on one side of the firewall, next to each other! ”

Linux developers will love USB / serial data transfer support. This will allow applications and command line scripts to communicate with serial ports.

In addition, WSL now supports mounting USB drives and network shares. It's a good news. The bad news is that it only supports the NT file system I / O infrastructure . In other words, you can only work with media formatted in FAT / FAT32 / NTFS file systems. What about * nix file systems? You can vote, comment, or do both in the thread of this request to UserVoice.

If you delve into the details of the improvements, the updated WSL in WinFCU includes the following:

  • Improved TCP parameters, such as IP_OPTIONS, IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP, IP_MULTICAST, and others.
  • Now /etc/hostsinherits entries from the hostsWindows file .
  • Support for system calls related to xattr.
  • Fix for some file system related features.
  • Improved support PTRACE.
  • Improved support FUTEX.
  • Now it works here chsh, which allows you to change the shell. In particular, now you can use your favorite shell directly. When the shell starts, other files will be executed .bashrc.

The following system calls have been added to the Fall Creators Update:

  • Prlimit64
  • getxattr, setxattr, listxattr,removexattr

As expected, WSL will be available on the Windows Server platform and on Windows virtual machines in Microsoft Azure. It is designed for system administrators.

With all these improvements, it will be easier for developers and system administrators to use the Linux shell commands on Windows. While a typical PC user may not find this particularly useful, for IT professionals this is a step forward. This expands the capabilities of Windows in the world of servers and cloud services, in which Linux is now playing an increasingly important role. Even in Azure, more than a third of virtual machines use Linux.

WSL provides most Linux shell tools . Among them - apt, ssh, find, grep, awk, sed, gpg,wget, tar, vim, emacs, diff, And patch. In addition, you can use popular open source programming languages ​​such as python, perl, ruby, php, and gcc. Further, WSL and Bash support server applications, such as the Apache web server and the Oracle MySQL database management system. In other words, with WSL on Windows, you can create a normal Linux-based development environment.

Using WSL, you can run graphical interfaces and Linux applications , but so far this possibility cannot be taken seriously. Of course, if they work on this, the situation will change.

How does WSL work? Dustin Kirkland, a member of Canonical's Ubuntu Product and Strategy, said: “We're talking about executing code directlyUbuntu ELF on Windows . [WSL] essentially performs real-time translation of Linux system calls into Windows system calls. Linux adherents may think of it as something like WINE, on the contrary, namely, Ubuntu binaries work quite naturally in Windows. ”

Summary


Regardless of the technical features of how WSL does its job, the most important thing is that the WIndows subsystem for Linux works very, very well. We hope you enjoy the new WSL.

Dear readers! If you have already upgraded to the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, please share your impressions of the new WSL.

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