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Windows 10 Will Soon Ship with a Full, Open Source, GPLed Linux Kernel

posted by chromas on Tuesday May 07 2019, @02:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the year-of-Linux-on-the-desktop dept.

aristarchus writes:

Has no one seen this yet? Don't cross the streams!

Ars Technica:

Earlier today, we wrote that Microsoft was going to add some big new features to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, including native support for Docker containers. It turns out that that ain't the half of it.

Not even half.

All is changing with Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. Instead of emulating the Linux kernel APIs on the NT kernel, WSL 2 is going to run a full Linux kernel in a lightweight virtual machine. This kernel will be trimmed down and tailored to this particular use case, with stripped-down hardware support (since it will defer to the host Windows OS for that) and faster booting.

The Linux kernel is GPLed open source; the GPL license requires that any modifications made to the code must be published and made available under the GPL license. Microsoft will duly comply with this, publishing the patches and modifications it makes to the kernel. WSL 2 will also use a similar split as the current WSL does: the kernel component will be shipped with Windows while "personalities" as provided by the various Linux distributions can be installed from the Microsoft Store.

To quote Han Solo, "I've got a bad feeling about this."

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by TheFool on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:34PM (1 child)

    by TheFool (7105) on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:34PM (#840253)

    He will have trouble understanding why he needs to pay Microsoft for what he now get at no added cost.

    The argument is usually:

    You have both Windows and Linux boxes. Wouldn't it be easier if the company's IT department could maintain both through a common (MS-owned) interface?/

    or

    Why are you paying some local guy to maintain these machines? We know how to maintain it better than they do. Wouldn't it be more efficient to move everything into The Cloud and let us manage it, while they do something else?

    If neither works against your employer, that's wonderful. Mine fell to the latter recently after resisting for a few years. And now I'm being pressured into using WSL rather than building on my actual CentOS box. It's a small company, so there is no iron-fisted IT that owns our dev boxes. But at my old company it would have been an easy sell. The IT department there only knew "Windows", but they'd be perfectly happy with a Windows Desktop Environment running Linux underneath.

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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by TheFool on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:37PM

    by TheFool (7105) on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:37PM (#840258)

    Oof, seems I can't close my tags either. Rough day.