Windows 10 Fall Creators Update and the Windows subsystem for Linux

System administrators and developers! Looks like it's a holiday in your street. WSL, since the last update, the so-called Fall Creators Update, has become a full part of Windows 10.



Do you want to use Linux on Windows using the WIndows subsystem for Linux ( Windows Subsystem for Linux , WSL), but what worries you is that WSL has beta status and is available only in Windows 10 developer mode? 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 and Windows shell, which has been tested for over a year , will gain many new features in WinFCU.
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Besides the fact that WSL has outgrown the status of the beta version and no longer requires the use of the developer mode, among its new features, the following should be noted:

• Installing Linux distributions from the Windows Store.
• WSL now supports running multiple Linux distributions.
• WSL is available in 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 the openSUSE distribution of the SUSE community, and its corporate version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) . In addition, it is expected that Fedora and other distributions will appear in the Windows Store soon.

If you have already used WSL, the existing Ubuntu installation will continue to work, but this option is deprecated and will not be supported. In order to use tech support, you need to replace the existing Ubuntu instance with a new one from the Windows Store. If this is not done, it will not be possible to get support from either Canonical or Microsoft.

In order to save old files, they are best archived with tar and copied to the Windows file system, for example, in /mnt/c/temp/backups , and then copied 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 Windows window, and then restart the system. It should be noted that WSL is not active by default, and that after switching it on you will have to reboot.
After rebooting, you need to search for the word Linux in the Windows Store, select the appropriate system and install it.

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

In addition to the ability to install multiple Linux distributions, several distributions can now be launched 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 running instance of WSL there is 2 GB of additional memory.

WSL itself requires minimal system resources. Rich Turner, senior program manager for the WSL and Windows Console at Microsoft, wrote the following: “We don’t list [the memory requirements], since, frankly, there is nothing much to say about this. If you have not installed WSL , no additional memory is used. If you enabled WSL, a small 850 KB driver is loaded for a short time, and then, before running the Linux distribution, it is unloaded. When it starts, it loads /init , which runs /bin/bash . This leads to loading the driver, which occupies 850 KB and to create pico-processes for init and bash . Therefore, in general, the WSL memory requirements comply with the requirements of the Linux tools, with the addition of approximately 1 MB. ”

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

Why may I need to run multiple Linux distributions at the same time? Microsoft says the following about this: “The ability to run different Linux distributions allows you to use the same tools, package managers, or the ecosystems and environments where your production code will run. This leads to the reduction of time lost in the search for hard-to-find errors when deploying code. This allows, for example, the use of Edge, Chrome and Firefox browsers on Windows to browse a web site 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 how all these processes work on the same side of the firewall, next to each other! ”

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

In addition, WSL now supports mounting USB drives and shared network resources. It's a good news. The bad news is that it only supports the NT I / O infrastructure of the file system . In other words, you can work only 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 on UserVoice.

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

• Improved TCP parameters, in particular, IP_OPTIONS , IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP , IP_MULTICAST , and others.
  
• Now /etc/hosts inherits entries from the Windows hosts .
  
• Support for system calls related to xattr .
• Fix some of the functions associated with the file system.
• Improved support for PTRACE .
• Improved support for FUTEX .
• Now chsh works chsh , which allows changing the shells. In particular, now your favorite shell can be used directly. When the shell starts, files other than .bashrc will be executed.

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

• Prlimit64
• getxattr , setxattr , listxattr , removexattr
  

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

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

WSL provides most of the Linux shell tools . Among them are 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, thanks to WSL on Windows, you can create a normal development environment based on Linux.

Using WSL, you can run graphical interfaces and Linux applications , but for now this feature cannot be taken seriously. Of course, if you work on this, the situation will change.

How does WSL work? Dustin Kirkland, a member of the Ubuntu Product and Strategy group at Canonical, said: “We are talking about the direct execution of the Ubuntu ELF code on Windows . [WSL] essentially performs the translation of Linux system calls into Windows system calls in real time. Linux enthusiasts can think of it as something like WINE to the contrary, namely, Ubuntu binaries work quite naturally on Windows. ”

Results

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

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